Betting on Yourself in Millwork with Chris (part 2)

In this episode of Verify In Field, host Jacob Edmond continues the conversation with Chris McClelland, Principal of Parliament Millwork, diving deep into CNC adoption, millwork software, and what it really takes to modernize a shop. 

Chris shares the realities of moving from panel saw production to CNC manufacturing, and how that shift unlocked the time and capacity required to scale properly. He walks through his journey from eCabinets to Mozaik, the frustrations of software limitations, and the discipline required to truly learn a platform rather than fight it. 

Together, Jacob and Chris unpack one of the most debated topics in millwork today, Mozaik versus Microvellum versus Cabinet Vision. Instead of marketing language, they discuss workflow, community support, user base differences, CAD first versus library first systems, and the practical implications for growing shops. 

Chris explains how investing in a CNC was not just about automation, but about buying back time. He reflects on the importance of structured learning, including the Cadmate training path, and how understanding parameters and hierarchy changed how his shop operates. 

This episode is not just about software. It is about mindset. It is about committing to modernization and accepting that growth requires discomfort. 

About Our Guest 

Chris McClelland is the Principal of Parliament Millwork, a dedicated millwork shop serving the Ottawa market. 

After transitioning from general contracting into full scale manufacturing, Chris invested in a Thermwood CNC and evolved his workflow from entry level CAM solutions to a fully customized Mozaik library. His approach blends entrepreneurial risk tolerance with disciplined systems building. 

Today, he focuses on production efficiency, parameter driven design, and building a shop that can scale intentionally. 
 
Where To Learn More  

Parliament Millwork 
https://parliamentmillwork.com   

Parliament Milwork´s Instagram: @parliamentmillwork   

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Transcript

Chris McClelland 0:00

coming off of a panel saw and drilling my hinge holes and on a blue mini press, I had d*ed and gone to heaven.

Jacob Edmond 0:13

Welcome back to Verify In Field, everybody. Today, I'm excited to share with you my special guest, Chris McLellan. He is principal of Parliament Millwork. They are a modern millwork shop in the Ottawa market, and we're gonna talk about his background, a little bit about the work he's doing today, how he got there, and nerd out a little bit about some engineering software as well. So thanks for joining me, Chris.

Chris McClelland 0:35

Thanks for having me, Jacob. Really excited to be here.

Jacob Edmond 0:37

Yeah. So you're, you moved to Ottawa. You started, where you-- That's where you're at now with Parliament, right? You're a full service shop, cabinet shop now.

Chris McClelland 0:48

Yes.

Jacob Edmond 0:49

Not just a contractor who's doing cabinetry.

Chris McClelland 0:53

No, that was the Switch. We are not a GC anymore, have no intention of Being it. Dedicated millwork.

Jacob Edmond 1:00

And today You're full fit out. You're into software, using Mozaik. You have CNC equipment.

Chris McClelland 1:06

yeah

Jacob Edmond 1:07

So you've evolved in tools further and you yourself have dove into both, equipping your shop, running a millwork shop. You've gone through the journey of, "Hey, now I need something besides just CAD or SketchUp," or, "I need something that can drive my machinery, and I can model in 3D." Can you tell us a little bit about that journey?

Chris McClelland 1:30

Yeah. So thankfully, before I jumped into CNC, I had heard enough horror stories that I didn't want... The old saying, you buy the service, not the machine. So Ottawa is a fairly major Canadian city, but we have no major brand representation. We are very close to both Montreal and Toronto, so I have any of the brands I could want within a one-day drive, or at least a four-hour, five-hour drive, Right. also gonna be so busy in their primary market that I might as well be a flight away

Jacob Edmond 2:08

Yeah.

Chris McClelland 2:09

we did all of our research, we ended up going with an American-made machine. We went with a Thermwood machine actually, the Thermwood dealer for all of Canada was in a town in Quebec called Saint Zotique, and they're about an hour and 40 minute drive

Jacob Edmond 2:24

Okay.

Chris McClelland 2:26

So we looked at a bunch of used equipment. I looked at four used Rovers and in various states of decay, and by the time we crunched the numbers on okay, if I'm gonna finance or lease a 5 to 10-year-old machine, I can only get lease over two years. So if I'm leasing a $80,000 used purchase price machine, but they're only getting me terms for two years and I have to put a bigger down on it, my monthly ended up not being that different than when I went with this brand new Thermwood machine. That is the... I'm gonna use locally in air quotes. It is, it was the l- most local dedicated service to where I was located and the company that sells them CNC Automation, they have a good reputation across Canada and I'd heard Andrew Legault's name from like multiple different touchpoints. Everyone's "Oh, you gotta talk to Andrew. You gotta talk to Andrew." Okay. So I'll look into these guys. But there's bad blood or there was bad blood between and Thermwood that dates back to multiple decades ago. We don't have to air the laundry on this podcast, but basically there was no and Mozaiks were not officially supported. There's guys that had jailbroken them and written their own posts, but Mozaik was not supporting Thermwoods, and CNC Automation and Thermwood was not supporting Mozaik. So we landed with eCabinets, which is Thermwood's free-to-use entry-level software. And that one was limited in-- when I really wanted to start getting into customization and doing custom tool paths and stuff like that. And don't get me wrong, it's a totally adequate software. And when we were doing, boxes and standard shaker doors, it was like it was dynamite. And coming off of a panel saw and drilling my hinge holes and on a blue mini press, I had d*ed and gone to heaven. I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But then you start to get... And I'm still having to do secondary and tertiary machining router jigs and, God forbid, a jigsaw to the side of a finished cabinet. And I'm like, "Okay there's got to be, better ways." And there was usually workarounds of how to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish in eCabinets. But I had wanted to be on Mozaik from the onset, and I just... but I was just resigned to be an eCabs guy, at least for the meantime. I had work coming in. I wasn't too worried about it. I guess now about maybe a year and a half ago now, the relationship thawed and Thermwood became officially supported by Mozaik. Maybe a little bit more than a year and a half, but I got my Mozaik subscription probably September of '25, was the first time we installed it on our computers. And before I made the switch for our whole company, I had-- at that point, I had an in-house designer who's not my wife, a millwork engineer both working for me. And they were working Chief Architect, was our client-facing design program, and eCabinets was our shop drawing program. We weren't doing full screen to machine in one dedicated piece of software. We had already found, okay, eCabinets, the 3D renderings are not up to my standard that I'm looking for. We'll use this piece of software to do everything client-facing, and then we'll redraw everything for the shop. Huge waste of time. But I sat down said, "Okay, for the next two or three months, I'm gonna spend all of my hours that are not in, the spray booth or installing or assembling cabinets or cutting parts on the CNC or edge banding All the extra time that we as millwork shop owners have, Right. We have tons of extra time, but I spent all that extra time diving into Mozaik and learning the program operated and creating our own custom library and starting to understand how parameters worked and the hierarchy of everything. And I spent maybe the first six months that sort of on my own. And then I that I'm not as smart as I thought I was, and that this Cadmate course that everyone was talking about, I should probably just buy the Cadmate course and learn on a semi-professional level. And so after six months of using Mozaik, we ended up basically scrapping that entire first library that I had been working on making the jump over to the Cadmate library and then doing our, again, our own customizations and just doing some changes onto basically how David had set up his library. Like nothing major, they're set up for butt joints and conformats and we're, qualified tenons and screws. Had to flip some stretchers around, do some stuff like that. But in that process, learning how, okay, this is actually the hierarchy of how I need to control things for my job. And okay, if I'm not set up from the onset here, and I'm trying to make changes, I'm trying to adjust my wall cabinet heights, individually in like my room tab, sorry, in my products tab, like I'm fighting a losing battle. Those things are gonna move on me every single time. So learning in the-- Learning how Mozaik actually intended to use the software and how the software was designed to be utilized was a game changer. 'Cause up until this point, like nobody taught me how to use CAD. I use CAD like I use a pencil and paper. I'm not very eloquent on my CAD. I can make a beautiful 2D line drawing of a cabinet job, but it's-- Like an experienced CAD user like yourself would walk-- If you were watching over my shoulder, you'd probably wanna throw up 'cause I don't have-- I've got my hotkeys and I got my shortcuts down a little bit, but not it. And then same with SketchUp, just learning by myself and getting functional with it, and same with Chief Architect, getting functional with it, but not having dedicated the time to actually like jumping in and learning the software. And whereas with eCabinets, I was running into issues that were limitations. We would-- I would call for support and from CNC automation and we would send a support ticket, and I'd be like: "Why can't I do X, Y, or Z?" And they'd be like: "Oh, that is just not supported within the current iteration of the software." It's free-to-use software. It's not their fault. And now with Mozaik, I'm finding that I haven't found anything yet that I haven't been able to do in software. I've just... I keep finding things that I haven't figured figured out how to or along the way, I found things that I just, I didn't know how to utilize that subset of parameters or that that combination of user-generated current parameters and, if I've got to edit parts in shape or edit operations directly on the part, that too. But the... it's interesting when you hear the the discourse online when you're looking up these softwares and I said this to you right before we started recording, that I read on a Reddit thread once that everything other than Microvellum was a kid's toy, and that if you're, if you wanna be a serious millwork shop you gotta be using Microvellum. It was more talking specifically about commercial, boxes and doors, kitchen stuff. But it was interesting seeing in these same forums, not like our dedicated Mozaik Facebook groups, but hearing people talk about their qualms with the Mozaik software, and they're like: "Oh, Yeah. like I'm... It doesn't do X, it doesn't do Y, it doesn't do Z for me." And I'm like: it... maybe you just don't actually know how to use the software" or have you done the Mozaik Mastery course?" They teach you exactly how to do that right in there. I'd actually be interested to ask you, have you found... what can Microvellum do that I can't do in Mozaik?

Jacob Edmond 10:34

So I think the biggest thing that I've found because this is the forever debate in our industry that I've found, and it always was Microvellum or Cabinet Vision, and Mozaik and Cabinet Vision kind of have a related history. And if you're familiar with, you've used Cabinet Vision, usually you can make the jump to Mozaik. They have very similar interfaces and stuff. But a lot of what you... That dialogue you hear from my perspective is Microvellum is a CAD-first software, and it's a CAD based. And so people that come from a CAD, AutoCAD background particularly AutoCAD plus Cutlist, Microvellum makes sense. Now, Microvellum is very complex, and Microvellum is a you can make it do almost anything with enough effort and with enough planning and work, right? so with that, a lot of what people struggle with Cabinet Vision or Mozaik in particular, is getting their presentation look how they want. And so if you come from a background of "Hey, I like my drawings to look a very certain way. I like-- I wanna be able to change my line types and my font styles and set up my title block," and all this stuff that Mozaik has multi-print and Cabinet Vision has, OCAD added. And with enough work you can kinda get there, but Not natively. And so somebody like yourself, what I'm seeing is Mozaik is starting to take off because there are a lot of people with a similar background to you of "Hey, I need this to fill a certain... I need work done. I need this to complement. I'm building a shop. I don't have a background where I've spent a dozen years knowing AutoCAD. I need to be able to get in and make it work fast." It's a much lower cost of entry usually for Mozaik. "Hey, can I just start paying monthly and I can get it set up?" if you're graduating from SAWs to a CNC, it's pretty quick and easy to set up a lot of different CNCs. I know there's a lot of guys in Mozaik plus ShopSabre connection. The community is very active, and so many of those users are at similar learning levels of either they're new to it or there's the people that have been using it for a handful of years, and you're kinda working with the same set of tools. And so whereas Microvellum for so many years, every year they would come out with a new library, and it was like starting over. So depending on what library you were on everybody was using a totally different set of data. There wasn't a ability to share tips and best practices because our version was totally different than the next shop over, and it's totally customized how we do things. And so but at the core, I think people's minds who are wired for doing shop drawings in AutoCAD and programming in a secondary software, Microvellum kinda makes more sense. It is basically Excel spreadsheets that tell what to draw and draws 2D routes and lines and kinda geometry for what you're doing. And so it's hard for people that have spent years wiring their brain to think that way, CAD first and cut list, to something that's more intuitive and simpler to learn, but it's just my brain is not wired that way. Things as far as you ask what it can do it has a tool like Solid Model Analyzer. So the other thing is if you're a 3D first person, you can draw things in 3D and say, "Hey, analyze this, this into a product." There's a lot of limitations with that, and you have to still know the limitations to be able to get the results you want. And I see a lot of the people in the Mozaik world now, like you said, and same thing with Cabinet Vision there's guys like Jonah and Myron in the Cabinet Vision world that are pushing it way beyond what it was ever intended to be able to do. And similarly with Mozaik, you've got guys like Phil Anton and Nick Frost and all these users on there sharing tips of maybe it's not easy to do, but you can make it do it. And then I think what's happening...

Chris McClelland 14:13

make it easy. They

Jacob Edmond 14:14

Yeah.

Chris McClelland 14:14

They've done the legwork. Everything I know about my customization on Mozaik is from the entry was CADmate

Jacob Edmond 14:21

Yeah.

Chris McClelland 14:25

or even Grant have designed their parts specifically and how their parameters talk to one another, and it's all just math, right? Design is math. And seeing, like-- I don't wanna say reverse engineer

Jacob Edmond 14:39

Yeah

Chris McClelland 14:39

but basically so if I know, okay, Nick likes to use this hierarchy and then this, he's using this to pull from this and same with Phil or Grant, then I'm like, okay, so I can add these into my own library, and I can do my own scribe wall, scribe ceiling, scribe soffit, and I can add my own toe height parameters and make all my stuff and control from, this parameter, job parameters list as opposed to having to go in and edit these parts individually. okay, so again, if any of the listeners are like me that have never even seen the Microvellum For one, Microvellum has CAM control in on board with it or is it a secondary software?

Jacob Edmond 15:17

No, it's on board. There are limitations. It is not a replacement for an AlphaCAM or an Ace-- Aspire or, any of those types of things. Mastercam, right?

Chris McClelland 15:28

That was gonna be my big ask is do do you ever have to still go to a secondary software if you wanna do some 3D carving?

Jacob Edmond 15:36

I- if you wanna do 3D stuff or if you wanna do 5-axis stuff, that is not a Microvellum thing. I can kind of write a macro to get it to control an aggregate, but really, Microvellum is designed to do 2D machining and edge boring and that type of stuff, right? And so where it gets complex, like RouterSim is a software that's designed, like it is designed at its core to recognize faces of a part Whereas, Microvellum more of a, like top-down, here's an edge, but I'm not turning to go that edge, and that kinda gets a little bit more complex. But what Microvellum does well is, I think better than the others, is you can create drawing tokens separate from machining tokens. You could tell it, "Here's how I want my 2D drawings to look separate from my 3D drawings, separate from my, what comes out of the machine." And that is a level that is also a kind of a steep learning curve for most people to understand how all those things work together. The other thing that I think the b- one of the bigger differences though is there's... The user base of Mozaik is way more guys just like you,

Chris McClelland 16:39

Yeah.

Jacob Edmond 16:41

by that is you're a business owner, you're an entrepreneur, you're creative, you're the guy doing the designing and the building. But you're also you don't have to ask anybody's permission to go post on a forum, "Hey, here's what I'm doing. Would this be helpful to somebody else?" And most Microvellum, and even Cabinet Vision users, are just engineers or drafters in a company, a large commercial shop that discourages sharing IP, right? And it's "Oh no, don't share what we've invested in building." And there's this idea for some reason of particularly in like the commercial millwork world that owners have that have never worked in CAD or don't really work in engineering of "That's our IP. We have this unique solution and we've created these products." There is I have never come across a single one that is actually anything unique or actually anything proprietary that, but they have this idea that "Oh my God, we've had this solution, so don't share it." And you are depriving your people of being able to a- also learn from other people sharing. And so Mozaik's user base is way more grassroots, way more active online, and people that are just like, "Hey, here's something I figured out if this is helpful," and, "Hey, I've got a question." And 20 people are right away "Oh, here do this," or, "I've done that before. Here's something can help you." And so that community is, like you said about you don't buy the machine, you buy the service. You don't buy the software, you buy the community. How many users are you able to tap into? Because that was the thing that drove me crazy when I first got into millwork. I came from architecture school and you could go on, one of a million forums. There w- at that time, there were so many like CAD block exchange networks, and then not only that, but think of like even just Excel or AutoCAD or Revit. I could go on Stack Overflow at the time, I could go on Reddit, I could go all these places and I could find thousands of posts and forums. Like we're both, we're millennials grew up where the internet was a wonderland of information, and then you go search Microvellum how to, zero results. You go to like millwork, CAM, like there is just nothing. And so that was what was crazy to me. And so that is a thing that I think Mozaik I don't know if they've done it intentionally or it's just happened because of the users, but there are Facebook groups that are active. And you can go so many places that it's... If y- if you today have an issue, you're gonna post somewhere, and within probably minutes somebody will comment or respond, right? Or there's already been a, something about it, and it's not controlled by Mozaik. It is totally grassroots community fed, and that's something that Cabinet Vision and Microvellum don't think they've ever been able to replicate. Microvellum has a little bit in the Australia market, but it just doesn't exist. So to me if I'm a new millwork shop owner, that's one of the appealing things I see about Mozaik is the user base and how many resources there are that are grassroots or just like Cadmate, which most recently I think technically got by Mozaik, but it used to be a totally different thing. Yes. They're Syncly.

Chris McClelland 19:38

He's wearing a

Jacob Edmond 19:39

Yeah. Uh,

Chris McClelland 19:40

Now.

Jacob Edmond 19:40

started totally as an independent thing of just a guy, it was- He had figured all this out and started creating resources like Nick Frost and Phil Anton and those guys, right? And so that I think is the biggest thing from it. And from that, the user base breeds where they do run into those things. "Hey, I've created this workaround." Eventually, if enough people find it useful, Mozaik will see that and say, "Hey, we should integrate that," or, we should create a solution for that." And I think that's the way software is meant... I think most fruitful for the users.

Chris McClelland 20:07

Yeah. Un-unbelievably, that's interesting though that-- even in, just in this conversation, the... disinformation's not the right word, but the information that I'd seen on forums would have led me to believe that was this sort of the peak of the mountain, and that everything else was a poor man's substitute. But it, but what it sounds like is it's a different from, and it's-- antiquated is not the right word, but it's a slightly older style of approach from when the tech stack of every shop was way different. If Microvellum's been around since before you could easily 3D render parts and draw in-- you could draw in, CAD 3D, but like, when did Microvellum come to market?

Jacob Edmond 20:56

it started when-- with 2D first. Really where it event- the origin story of Microvellum and then there's posts, and I think I had David Fairbanks on one of my early episodes of this pod- podcast. If anybody's listening, you can go back to episode four. If I rem-- I'll find that and link it here. But the founder of Microvellum, which wasn't David Fairbanks but he was really doing drafting shop drawings in AutoCAD. And then he was like, "There's gotta be an easier way I can automate this he figured out how to tie Excel to CAD and have Excel cut lists tell AutoCAD what to draw, just 2D, elevations, plans, stuff like that. From that it grew, and he built a whole full-fledged CAD and CAM platform from it. Your... What you did say is pretty ac- it kinda came from an old way. Eventually, it was literally just Excel spreadsheets and CAD. In 2013, 2014, somewhere around that time, they migrated to version 7 and being database-backed, and everybody was kinda going to SQL, Cabinet Vision, Microvellum, and SQL, and they've kinda stayed that way since then. obviously, now Innergy has bought it, and they're integrating some of it into next-gen stuff and they're working on that. But it's not totally wrong that Microvellum is more capable than a Mozaik and Cabinet Vision in many ways. But it is not, Oh it's not something you can just put in like a tier system in my opinion, cause there are things that both Mozaik and Cabinet Vision do that Microvellum can't. Cabinet Vision has a full screen to machine, has a lot more on the machine output side capabilities than Microvellum does in, in many ways.

Chris McClelland 22:28

Okay

Jacob Edmond 22:28

Again, there's more custom-- it's easier to customize Microvellum and you can get custom tool files and custom outputs and stuff, but there's automations and things that are just kinda native to screen to machine integrating with your machines that you can even kinda bypass Cabinet Vision and go straight to that. Jonah had built plugins that go straight into screen to machine and bypass the whole drawings side of it. I think Mozaik is definitely a much more user-friendly, easier to learn if you've never used any tool, CAD tool particular to begin with. There are definitely limitations to it, and I would say it's more on the multi-print versus having full-fledged CAD. But the other thing is because Microvellum is in CAD, things that Microvellum can't even do, people will just use and draw in 2D, draw in 3D to make it the way they don't have a product for it. So most of what on forums though are people that have limited experience. There's very few people that have used all the tools, and it's maybe "I worked at a shop, I used it for a month, and then now I have most of my experience." Most of my experience is Microvellum. At Duckworks We do Microvellum, Mozaik, and Cabinet Vision, as well as AutoCAD and Rhino and some others. And my job is in part to stay somewhat, and I get these questions all day every day from clients and stuff. And so it is evolving at a much more rapid pace than I've ever seen. And that, I think to me, that's the exciting part is because, all of these companies are gonna have to evolve or fall behind, and there'll be some clear winners.

Chris McClelland 23:46

Yeah. So at this point, Microvellum is like I'm pulling cabinets out of a library?

Jacob Edmond 23:53

Yes. So it is designed to be library-based, but you can build things one-off. But it, by and large it is, people are pulling out of a library, and when you buy it, you get a library with it that people will customize and stuff.

Chris McClelland 24:05

The term old-fashioned is not the right word, 'cause at the time, that was like bleeding edge, cutting edge

Jacob Edmond 24:12

yeah.

Chris McClelland 24:12

Of everything. I don't know what year it was, but what did people have? Just like a Mastercam-type

Jacob Edmond 24:18

are a lot of other kind of softwares that have come and gone. You talk about eCabinet, there used to be, before Cabinet Vision, there was Cabinet Ware, there was a lot of kind of similar startup softwares that were... back then it was CNC software was still kinda, or CNCs machinery was still pretty new to the industry, and so it was, as that was coming out, you needed software to drive it. And most every ma- machinery company, BSC, SCM Homag. At the time, tho- those were actually different companies. You had Wiki had their own software. You had... So y- the Wood Wops of the world, the B Solids of the world, the... most of the machine companies make their own native software, which is a true just CAM software. And if you have one of those machines, you have that on the machine, and you can just create a program there, right? Not many people are trained in that software. It is a very machine-based software, right? And what the Cabinet Visions of the world, the Microvellums, the Mozaiks is, the goal of that is to remove the user. Think of it of the machine software, the machine you use is am I coding in a terminal versus asking ChatGPT to, to tell it an output, and somewhere in between there, right? And so the goal is to automate it and lower the barrier of entry for the user and make it more designed. The gap that all of them struggle with, and almost every company is, and you alluded to this, is you still have to go into Fusion 360 or others, is it is still very difficult for a user to get 100% of what they need out of a library-based software. Everybody encounters a millwork product that's "I don't have this in my library yet." The software could do it with enough time, but I need to get something designed and just out to my client today. I can sketch it really quickly, or I can go in another software, a SketchUp, a Fusion, a Rhino, a AutoCAD, and I can quickly model what it's gonna look like, but then I kinda have to redo it to get to my machine output. That is the holy grail of

Chris McClelland 26:11

Yeah.

Jacob Edmond 26:13

figured out how to do that or there hasn't been enough investment In Microvellum, the closest they have is the solid model analyzer. And everybody's trying to make a version of that, and that is really the thing that our industry as a whole hasn't figured out. But if I were to categorize the softwares, you've got Cabinet Vision, Microvellum Mozaik Wood CAD/CAM or Homag IX or EMOS for the, our Europeans, that are library-based interface controlling cut list to CAM softwares, right? But they're largely, I can draw a rectangular part with some shaping to it. Then you've got... What they haven't been able to bridge is things like what Rhino and Fusion 360 can do, which are true three-dimensional four and five-axis capability CAM packages tied to what you see is what you get. Hey, if I can draw what I wanna build, I could get that to a machine, and that's the gap that we haven't had, and people are still supplementing things.

Chris McClelland 27:07

So Microvellum is not an Autodesk product. It's CAD-based, but it's not an Autodesk product.

Jacob Edmond 27:14

They license Autodesk And now BricsCAD as the CAD engine that their software uses to model what it's telling you to model. So that is the other difference between Cabinet Vision and Mozaik is Microvellum overlays into another company like Autodesk or BricsCAD's CAD software to model their data of what their CAM software is telling it to do. this is something where maybe I should do a whole spinoff episode on this and do some content, 'cause I get these questions a lot about mozaik versus all these different software and the difference of them. And it's something that people that are new to trying to make the decision, like it's a lot of research to figure out how to make the decision that you ultimately had to make yourself, right? With, "Hey, I'm gonna go in on Mozaik." And a lot of people start with the machine first and then this software works with it, which is a good way to start. But then you very quickly get to like where you did with eCabinets of okay, there's limitations here. I didn't realize that maybe it don't fit what I do. And it's, it is about the product type, it's about your workflow, and then what I would say is definitely the community and what resources are available there.

Chris McClelland 28:14

You don't know what you don't know yet

Jacob Edmond 28:15

Yeah

Chris McClelland 28:16

when you first... like I had never run a CNC. I'd never worked in a shop with a CNC. So the first CNC I ever touched was my brand-new Thermwood Yeah. So the first software that we were used that was Screen to Machine And that was the other nice thing is I got in-person training. went to the brick-and-mortar in Saint-Sulpice of CNC Automation and actually got trained up on eCabinet. So I wasn't shooting from the hip when we started with eCabinet. So they-- We got-- We really did get set up for success, and we could run a successful, happy cabinet company using just that software. It-- has, not eCabinets itself. Yeah, actually, even on eCabinets itself, you can import DXF geometry for your custom-shaped parts. So we were doing a lot of that, a lot of Draft Sight 'cause, CAD licenses got extremely expensive. So we were using a lot of Draft Sight CAD work and bringing those part geometries into eCabs or running those directly on the Thermwood what do They call their console controls? that super controller. Thermwood super controller, which is like their B-Solid. But again, I was searching for so long for that before jumping into Mozaik for real, like, "Is there one software that's going to do it all? Does This software exist? And it sounds like it, it doesn't. There's no maybe-- I don't know. Maybe if the guys that are using the plug-ins for Fusion that are doing the full parametric kitchens in Fusion 360, maybe they're able to do it one software, but I'm sure they've got their own limitations

Jacob Edmond 29:46

They all

Chris McClelland 29:46

that.

Jacob Edmond 29:47

their pros and their cons. And I could tell you, I've got shops that tell me, "Hey," I've landed Cabinet Vision because it does the one thing that I couldn't get Microvellum or Mozaik or Wood CAD/CAM or any of these others to do. And I've got just as many shops that say the same thing about the other software. "Hey, I had to use Microvellum because I couldn't get Cabinet Vision to do this." And I think from my perspective, we are an industry that is too niche that we're not able to just get what we need from a mainstream solution like a Revit or an AutoCAD or a Fusion, which has billions of dollars of investment that to benefit all the industries that use it, we need something that is way more niche. But we also are too architectural-based that to use a SolidWorks or a, an Inventor or even just a Fusion 360 by itself, which is more product design-based, because we

Chris McClelland 30:36

Yeah.

Jacob Edmond 30:37

products a bunch of times. Everything's unique, and we need to do full elevations of a bunch of products together in a room. And so we're this weird mishmash of maybe one day we'll, with AI and the way tech is going, it'll be a lot easier to get the level of quality of software that billion dollars of industries kind of benefit from a- at our niche level. Or maybe somebody will listen to this podcast and say, "Oh I got it figured out."

Chris McClelland 31:02

Yeah.

Jacob Edmond 31:02

Chris, what advice would you give to anybody that's listening, and anybody that's made it an hour and 19 minutes listening to us that is inspired by your story, inspired or maybe, hey, they relate to it and say, "Hey, I'm, a few years behind where Chris is now. I would love to make that jump from the being renovicted to I've got my full shop in a new market, and we're not just a contractor doing shop." You've continued to reinvent yourself, and you're still a young guy, for millwork terms. You've lived many careers already. What advice would you have for other people that are thinking about making a career or trying to figure out how to make a career?

Chris McClelland 31:40

comfortable with not sleeping and not having any money for a while. And can't afford to not have a CNC. I think that is if you wanna do any form, even mild levels of production, I- it's 2026, you can't afford to not have a CNC. I-- When we moved into the full shop we didn't jump onto the CNC Right away. but just the out- the level of output. So in moving to the CNC getting me off of the panel saw and the blue mini press for drilling all of our hardware holes, that allowed me the time to start actually learning the software and really starting to understand it and learning how to, to design and to do everything. The other thing I would say is that, You don't know anything until you've done 100 kitchens. Like I still don't know anything, I feel like some days. You gotta have a constitution that, you're able to make some mistakes along the way and, and you have to be able to take those lickings and implement the knowledge from those mistakes. If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning anything. I've, I say this to my employees all the time "I never learned anything by d- anything by getting it right. Learn everything by getting it wrong." Like I'm a little biased, but like Mozaik's a supreme product in in, in my mind. Like I will, I'll just come out and say that. I thought that the thing that Microvellum had for sure on Mosaic was that 3D and five-axis, the stuff that I am personally going to Fusion for. hearing that and having that conversation or this conversation with you tonight has been great to sort of that itch of okay, now that I'm like pretty, pretty established with Mozaik, a- again, it's, I'm not really finding stuff, limitations of the software right now. But like looking pretty cool and maybe I want to make the switch again or start doing some more research into what's next 'cause if I want to be a, if I want to go from a million dollar a year shop to a 20 million a year shop, is that still a Mozaik

Jacob Edmond 33:49

Right.

Chris McClelland 33:51

there's guy-- I, actually, I know there's guys out here that

Jacob Edmond 33:55

Oh, yeah.

Chris McClelland 33:56

a year guys that are using Mozaik still. I would say probably the market share of those 10 plus, 20 plus a year shops that are using a Microvellum or a Cabinet Vision versus a Mozaik is gonna skew higher to the Microvellums and the CabinetVisions,

Jacob Edmond 34:11

Yeah.

Chris McClelland 34:11

just for

Jacob Edmond 34:12

Yeah. Awesome. Chris, I really appreciate you taking time away from your family to come on here and speak with me sharing your story. It's super inspiring, and I'm excited to have people hear it.