North America's Exploding Mass Timber Market : Hardy Wentzel on The Future of Mass Timber | #7

Learn how the exploding North American Mass Timber industry will shape the future of sustainable building.

Hardy Wentzel, a seasoned veteran with four decades of executive experience in the wood products industry, tells us how.   Hardy shares his insights about the growth and evolution of the Mass Timber industry through his tenure at Tolko Industries and Weyerhaeuser and then through his role as CEO of Structurlam Mass Timber.

We examine the rise of Mass Timber in Europe and the pressing need for identical expansion here in North America. Hardy details the trials and triumphs associated with setting up a mass timber factory. Then we jump into the the world of saw milling and  the critical role it plays in Mass Timber products. 

Hardy  credits much of his success to the mentorship he received from industry leaders. He shares about the people who have inspired him in the Mass Timber world, underlining the importance of investment in the next generation. 

Hardy’s vision for the future of the industry and his invaluable advice is a must-hear. Be  inspired by and get educated on the future of Mass Timber. 

Connect with Hardy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hardywentzel/

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:03

If you're an architect or an engineer and you exercise your specification muscle and you reduce the embodied carbon in an office tower, an office building. Take my 12 story example again by 1% you will save 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. So that's 100 in your professional life versus six or five in your private life. If you put Mass Timber as a main building material in the commercial construction segment, you will reduce carbon emissions in the construction industry by 70%.

Speaker 2 0:49

This is the Mass Timber Group Show. I'm Nick.

Speaker 3 0:52

And I'm Brady and we talk to sustainable building experts. On today's episode we interview Hardy Wensel. Hardy has four decades of executive experience across Europe and North America in the wood products industry. His experience ranges from the VP level at Toklo Industries and then later on with Warehouser. Then, notably, he served as the CEO of StructureLam Mass Timber, where he led the company from a regional British Columbia business to a North American Mass Timber leader. Now he brings that experience and his knowledge of the Mass Timber industry into his own consulting firm where he specializes in business development, manufacturing and marketing in the Mass Timber industry.

Speaker 2 1:30

You're going to enjoy this episode. We talk about why the price of lumber does what it does to, how sawmills and Mass Timber don't need to be married together on the same piece of land to succeed. We talk about how the existing infrastructure, from milling to the forests of the United States, are set up to rapidly grow and expand to fulfill the Mass Timber needs into the future.

Speaker 3 1:53

It was a fantastic episode. I can't wait for you guys to hear it. With that, let's get into it.

Speaker 1 1:58

I got in the industry right out of college. I did a civil engineering program and got hired on a long time ago by a company out of Boise, idaho. I grew up in Edmonton, alberta, in Canada. This company out of Boise was called Tress Joist, one of the forefathers of the engineered lumber business. They were looking for technical representatives. I signed up and got going that way and found it to be quite a fascinating journey because many of the things I'm seeing today in Mass Timber are almost identical to the gross curve that we saw in engineered lumber products over the decades. That's how I started. Through that progression, I moved into the US markets. I worked in California with the company. I then moved overseas to Belgium and I worked with the company in Belgium setting up a European operations for engineered wood products.

Speaker 1 3:01

During my seven years in Belgium, the company was acquired by a warehouser. That was a big jump for us all going out of this entrepreneurial style of business and being absorbed by a very large forest products company. At that time, through my tenure at Warehouser, I was able to also work in the OSB panel industry, which was very enlightening as well how to do value added products in a commodity sector, which was quite different than what I was accustomed to. From there I moved into working for a company here nearby where I live called Toko Industries, one of the larger privately held Canadian lumber producers. I learned a lot about lumber From there.

Speaker 1 3:55

I moved into being a, in transition a consultant for Structural Lamb and started helping Structural Lamb with some of their very early on business development concepts on how to sell CLT and Blue Lamb. As we know, at Mass Timber that company went through a sale process and I became the CEO of that company Up until about a year ago when I left Structural Lamb. And now Structural Lamb was just recently acquired by Mercer Industries. There you see another example of a large forest products company moving into a space like Mass Timber, where it's still very early days, but they're seeing the potential of that industry. They've made some very bold strategic moves in getting into that industry what we're talking about today here at Mass Timber.

Speaker 3 4:54

What do you think that tells us about the future?

Speaker 1 4:57

I think it's very poignant actually that the future of Mass Timber is definitely something that is growing. A lot of large strategic companies in the forest product space are now looking at Mass Timber. I do know that the backup bid to the Mercer bid to acquire Structural Lamb was warehouser. That's public information. When you have companies of that ilk, of that scale in forest products, looking at an emerging market like Mass Timber, I believe that we're starting to see a bit of a corner being turned and the industry is now going to start to develop and be developed by larger scale companies.

Speaker 1 5:45

It's very similar to the trajectory that we saw in Europe 25, 26 years ago when the first big players getting into Mass Timber. You had startup companies as well, but then you had large companies like Binderholtz and Hasslacher and Meyer Melnhoff. All of these companies were lumber producers first and foremost. Many of those companies I just mentioned are decades old, some of them even more than 100 years old. It was a natural extension for them to begin doing Mass Timber as well. Some of the market dynamics are different in Europe, but strategically I think that all kinds of lines up with what we're seeing here.

Speaker 2 6:35

There's some a ton of question out there with the price of lumber. Gosh. I don't know another better person that understands the inside workings of what the price of lumber is, working with Warehouser and Tolko and all these different plants. Sometimes when you're talking to people about Mass Timber they're like, oh gosh, it commands a premium. Or well gosh, I went through two historic market highs the last couple of years. How would you tell somebody about Mass Timber, about what's really? It's a commodity just like metal, just like anything. But could you speak to how maybe a mill prices lumber and maybe how that gets factored into Mass Timber?

Speaker 1 7:15

Yeah, it's really it's complicated, but it's really not that complicated. The every building material that we know of has raw material ingredients, right, steel does, concrete does, and then in those ingredients, you have supply chain dynamics and then you have the supply chain that the final product is actually trying to, trying to get manufactured to. In the case of mass timber, we need lumber as a raw material to make CLT panels and glulam beams and columns, and there are specialty grades of lumber. And, yes, we went through this crazy lumber pricing experience during the COVID years. We had two massive run-ups, and it was all due to the COVID induced supply chain disruptions.

Speaker 1 8:14

When COVID started lumber prices, already in early first quarter of 2020, lumber prices were already at historic low levels. Many mills were beginning to consider taking curtailment and downtime, and so they already had that horse leave the barn. And then, in mid-March of 2020, the world stopped because of a global pandemic, and so everybody was forced to stay home and work remotely. Only the essential services were allowed to go to work. Fortunately, construction was one of them. We were just, at that time, launching the construction of our new factory in Arkansas and, with everybody being home, everybody started to do home improvement projects and as a result of that, they all went to the big box stores Home Depot, lowe's, etc. To buy their supplies and there was no lumber on the shelf because of the mill curtailments prior to COVID. And then that just caused this spiraling event of an upward spiral of events on lumber pricing, which the mills all had to fire back up again. Many people didn't want to go to work or couldn't go to work. It was very state province specific, and so the situation exasperated and we had these huge run-ups. We had one period of a down cycle. Everybody thought it was over, and then it just all happened again due to other factors. So the whole supply chain got disrupted.

Speaker 1 9:55

Now I can tell you those two peaks were four times the last 20-year average of lumber prices. It was never, ever seen before. Now I can also tell you that lumber prices have come back into the 10-year average price range. We're seeing a little bit of a commodity increase right now for other reasons, but it's still very range bound between the 10-year high and the 10-year low pricing point. But we also saw spikes in concrete, we saw spikes in steel, we saw spikes in precious metals. Every supply chain was affected by this and, yes, mass Timber had a big hit. Our prices have come back down to some kind of a normal level, I would say. I was just looking at a recent report from one of my clients on this very topic and a lot of these other key ingredients for construction are still relatively high price. They're not at their COVID peaks but they haven't come down like lumber hats. So I would say we're working in a pretty normal lumber market right now. That said, lumber is the main ingredient to make Mass Timber. That goes without saying.

Speaker 3 11:16

There's a lot of talk right now about housing shortages across the United States and especially Canada too. One about affordability, but also two. Depending on who you ask. It's millions of homes that we need to build or construct in order to catch up with the demand. How do you think that Mass Timber plays into that equation over the next decade?

Speaker 1 11:37

That's a big question and I'm working on some projects in Europe as well right now and I've seen many of the same housing shortage topics being spoke about in England, in Germany and France. It's really a big problem worldwide. Where Mass Timber can help, that is in this emerging sector of the Mass Timber industry called tall wood buildings, especially here in North America where building codes have now been increased on the Mass Timber side to build tall wood buildings up to 18 stories tall. So multifamily homes is really where the solving of the housing shortage can happen. We don't have a shortage of custom homes or high-end homes. Those homes are always there and will be there. It's more in the middle level and also in the more affordable housing category and I think that's an area where Mass Timber can play. Our building codes are now allowing that. We're waiting for certain jurisdictions in the building code environment to adopt these new codes, but it's actually happening very rapidly and I believe that Mass Timber can play a big role there.

Speaker 1 12:55

Mass Timber is cost competitive now with steel and cast-in-place concrete structures. I just worked on another project where we analyzed a 12-story office building. Two Mass Timber options a cast-in-place concrete option and a structural steel with concrete floor slabs was the fourth option and Mass Timber was right there, within 3-4% of the other two. But the big kicker for Mass Timber was that these Mass Timber buildings, you can gain so much on schedule that you're monetizing your capital, your investment, up to six months sooner. So even if you paid 3-4% more for your Mass Timber option, the value of monetizing your investment that much sooner is more than offsets the price premium.

Speaker 3 13:54

As you see the demand for mass timber pickup in the future. What does that look like for the industry itself, whether that's producers, erectors, all of the AEC components that wrap around that? Mass timber in general in America is circa a decade or younger. How do you see the trends going forward?

Mass Timber Construction and Industry Growth

Speaker 1 14:13

Yeah, we're. So. Our first manufacturing standards came out in 2012. So I guess we're 11 years into the game here right now. So the first decade is we're there, europe, with the mass timber as we know it in North America. So with the LT panels and glue laminated timber beams and columns or glue lamb. They've been doing this mass timber style construction in Europe for since 1997 ish. So they're 25, 26 years into the game. They have 69 CLT plants, maybe 70. I just heard of another one opening last week or last recent weeks. Meyer Meldhoff just opened a large scale CLT plant. So we're sitting around 69 or 70 factories in the in the European continent. There are over 200 glue lamb plants in Europe.

Speaker 1 15:12

As we know glue lamp today, and that's because glue lamb is it's almost 200 years old as a building material. No one can really tell you how many glue lamp factories there are, because Europe is so jurisdictional or communal that way, but the estimate is around 200. I can tell you in North America in 2018, we had eight factories. We have since doubled now to teen, and that's primarily a CLT plants and we have an extreme shortage of supply of glue lamp factories. Now we do make some glue lamp here a reasonable amount of glue lamb in North America and Canada the US. The majority of it, though, is used in symbol family home applications as beams and headers over doors and windows. It doesn't really apply to a CLT ready glue lamp product, which is usually much bigger in cross section, carrying much heavier modes. A lot of our glue lamp presses in North America can't support the dimensional sizes that we need to make glue lamp for mass timber buildings. What does that all mean? Our demand is growing by 25% per year.

Speaker 1 16:33

To stand up a factory, like I did in Arkansas, is about a three year journey, and right now we have very limited glue lamb and our CLT. We only have 16 CLT plants, and I just told you that in Europe. If we just count the CLT plants in Europe, we're sitting at about 69 or 70. So we got to get building some plants here very soon, and that's a three year undertaking. By the time, push the go button, put a shovel in the ground, either retrofit a brownfield site or an existing site, or build a greenfield site.

Speaker 1 17:16

So we're going to be reliant on European imports. We're going to need the hot sloppers, the Meyer Melnhoffs, the V-hugs, the KLHs, all those big players, binderholtz for sure. Binderholtz is going to build a plant at one of their newly acquired sawmills on the east coast of North America. They bought a sawmill in North Florida and North Carolina and we can anticipate to see a LT plant there. But we're going to be reliant on offshore supply and American investors or forest products companies like I talked about a moment ago are going to need to have to start investing in mass timber. But those investments they're $90 investments you're going to have to be really certain that there's a payback on it.

Speaker 2 18:10

Speaking about how fast the industry is moving, I feel like everybody thinks we're in this hockey stick curve of adoption and we've hit that inflection point where it's basically pointed straight up to the ceiling in like a rocket ship. There's a lot of turnover out there and it sounds like you were on the front lines with the StructureLam build out in Arkansas. I think people would be super interested to hear. I know that this is. You could talk for days on how to put one up, but maybe what were some lessons learned with that whole operation out there? I know StructureLam was a serious player in the game, producing a lot of product, but what's your insight on building an operational mass timber plant?

Challenges and Potential of Mass Timber

Speaker 1 18:55

Yeah, I can also tell you from all my past experiences in the lumber industry and the OSB industry an engineered lumber, et cetera. Any large capital project to build a factory is going to be problematic, even in saw milling. Saw milling is one of the oldest building materials known to mankind. My gosh, I just read something about. In the Egyptian pyramids in some 6,000 BC tide period, they saw some hieroglyphics of hewers of wood, these little stickman sketches with some form of a bronze age saw carving up a big timber. We've been doing my point Don't fact check me please, because I might have these stakes wrong but we have been hewers of wood since the beginning of time. Even today, one of my very close colleagues just stood up a new saw mill in Mississippi and you can almost I'm oversimplifying this, so my saw mill friends will be angry when I say this, but you can almost pick up the saw mill catalog and say I want to build this saw mill and it'll have the front end, the middle end, the kilns, the grading systems, the conveyor systems, the packaging, sorting, stacking, whatever It'll be. I want a 250 million board foot saw mill. I want this one. Boom, let's go Well.

Speaker 1 20:31

In that startup there were even challenges that we experienced similar challenges in Arkansas. Now we had it was a bit of a high wire, tight rope act to get this plant started or built machinery installation, implementations, ramp up, et cetera, et cetera all to deliver the world's largest mass timber project for Walmart. It was everything had to come together and we had some machinery challenges and the machinery challenges were right in one of the very most critical aspects of any mass timber product, be it glulam or CLT, and that is on the finger joint line where you're actually connecting boards short boards to make 60 foot long boards or a lamella, and that is like the six in your cervical spine, a finger joint. It's critical. You're saying it's critical because if happened to have a spinal cord injury, a lot of bad things happen and it's the same thing in a in making mass timber. These are engineered wood products. I have a high standard when it comes to quality. I would not look the other way. We had to get this right. We'd been doing finger joints in British Columbia for over 60 years but we ran into a machinery challenge and unfortunately, all of this machinery in a sawmill and an OSB mill is heavy industrial machinery and they're not on a shelf at a big box store. You've got to work with what you've got, you've got to wrestle the problem to the ground and you've got to make improvised decisions. We make some adjustments in your line and we had to make an adjustment in our line and that was to change the glue system to make a finger joint. We had to pivot from a polyurethane glue system to a melamine, urea, formaldehyde glue system, which required a high voltage curing tunnel or a radio frequency curing tunnel, and we fast-tracked that tunnel and the change in the glue system and that caused the delay and we had a really big client waiting for our product and that became very problematic. So that's what happens. It happens in an OSB plant I mentioned. The Arkansas investment was about a $90 million investment, just to put that into context. The sawmill costs about $200 million to build and an OSB plant can be north of $350 million to build and each one of those capital expenditures can result in problems and startup challenges.

Speaker 1 23:27

I have a bit of a vignette I like to tell about paralleling mass timber market adoption to the tech sector of the early 1990s. And there was a book written by someone who went through that whole thing called Crossing the Chasm and we're in this place called the Messy Middle right now and there's supply chain bottlenecks everywhere. There's plants, there's designers, there's installers, there's it's just part and parcel of a emerging industry. So maybe we can pick on that a little bit, this thing that any new technology or new product or new service has to be able to get across to make it a viable building material. And in the case of mass timber, we need to not only deal with factories. Everybody thinks we need more factories and we do need more.

Speaker 1 24:25

Like I said before, europe has got 69 CLT plants, we've got 16 and they've been at it for 25 years. We've just been at it for a decade and so we got, I think will be of equal size to Europe after about 25 years of market adoption here in North America, and so that means we need a lot more factories and people think of factors. But we also need designers, we also need installers, we also need people building officials that know what mass timber is. So we're in this place called the Messy Middle. I think we've frost over the chasm, meaning that we're now onto early adopters and getting moving up that hockey stick shaft in a very rapid way to get into the early majority of users of this product. And when you think about Messy Middle, the whole industry is new and so we've got to adapt ourselves in many areas, and that's why we are paying education tax along the way here, whether it's with rough plant startups or not having enough labor or not having the designer know how to efficiently design and mass timber. But boy oh boy, I believe that we're accelerating through this Messy Middle faster than any other product I've been involved with in my four decades in the industry.

Speaker 1 26:01

Engineered lumber had a very similar hockey stick curve. Osb panels saw a very similar hockey stick curve. And then what's the accelerant in mass timber? The accelerant is the fact that we've got climate imperatives that we have to deal with. Many of our designer partners are truly climate warriors, really taking their job serious and designing in a sustainable way. Mass timber is a perfect design solution for many building typologies. We also have to do some, so there's reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions. We also have to see changes and disruption in our construction industry, because we're really the construction industry is doing the best that it can do, but it's also constrained by using legacy materials and legacy methodologies to build buildings, namely concrete and steel, and the building practices that go with that, as we're moving into mass timber and we're a small percentage of commercial construction today, but at some point we're going to be sitting right beside concrete and steel as a mainstream building material and as we move through this messy middle, these are just growing pains that we're going to have to endure.

Speaker 3 27:30

You mentioned climate and environmental concerns and how mass timber can shine. In that regard, what are some examples of how mass timber buildings would stack up to a cast and place concrete?

Speaker 1 27:42

From an environmental perspective, clearly from a carbon sequestration standpoint, that's not even a fair fight for concrete and steel to try to fight against wood in that context. Wood, just by its very nature, by its composition, is 50% carbon. It's a carbon storage bank, it's a carbon battery and as long as we insist on high standards when it comes to reforestation and how we take care of the woodlands or wood baskets, it's the perfect building material. And in North America, in Europe, western Europe and in the Western world Australasia included, if you look at New Zealand and Australia we take very good care of our forests. Some people will argue that we don't take good enough care, but I can attest to the fact that we do. We not only have certification programs in place like FSC and SFI and PEFC all these acronyms all are doing similar things. People will argue that one is better than the other. We also have legislation in place at the state, province and federal level to replant what we harvest. And when you take into consideration that full life cycle, analysis of the tree, the harvest, the conversion to a mass timber product, it's 50% carbon. It's stored and you plant trees right behind it in the parameters that foresters give the people that are using the forests to monetize the forest. It's a renewable cycle that is no other building material can match.

Speaker 1 29:35

I did a project this 12-story office building that I talked about that we were 3-4% within reach of concrete and steel. But when you factor in the early monetization of the project, the mass timber solutions are actually more economical. And not to forget that in some markets developers are able to charge higher selling prices or rental leasing rates for mass timber buildings just because of the value that they provide and people are drawn to them because they want to work in a sustainable place or live in a sustainable place or play in a sustainable place or learn in a sustainable place. The 12-story office building I actually went on the Woodworks website. They have an interesting carbon calculator tool and for North America's forests to replenish the mass timber Lulam and CLT panels in a 12-story office building only takes 22 minutes. To replenish the wood that was used in that 12-story 294,000 square foot building 22 minutes.

Speaker 2 30:48

Which is crazy. There's another unbelievable statistic. I think you shared it on LinkedIn. What was it, remind us? It was the 1% reduction equals.

Speaker 1 30:59

Yeah, I gave a. I was asked to be a guest lecturer at the University of Illinois to a master's program for architecture students in mass timber design, and my professional friend Paul Fast, principal at Fast Ep Engineering, was the professor at this university. He invited me to speak and the one point I wanted to leave the students with was that they are climate warriors. They need to consider themselves to be climate warriors because their professional influence is so much stronger than their personal choices. It's not even funny. So the statistic I gave was actually a fennelette pork that Erip prepared, one of the talk thought leaders at Erip, and it was.

Speaker 1 31:56

If you forego a transatlantic flight from Chicago to London Heathrow, you'll save one metric ton of carbon emissions. If you change your diet and your eating habits to a more of a vegetable base or plant based diet, you'll save another metric ton of carbon emissions. If you ditch the family car, you'll save three metric tons. However, if you're an architect or an engineer and you exercise your specification muscle and you reduce the embodied carbon in an office tower, an office building take my 12 story example again, by 1% you will save 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. So that's 100 in your professional life versus six or five in your private life.

Speaker 3 32:56

Right Much different.

Speaker 1 32:58

It's staggering. Another thing I just saw earlier was if you put mass timber as a main building material in the commercial construction segment, you will reduce carbon emissions in the construction industry by 70%. Done, real, yeah, the construction industry. When you look at operational carbon, which is what the energy required to heat, cool light, power a building and we're doing a lot in that our building codes are doing a lot with changing building regulations on the energy code side, which is really good. But operational carbon right now is 27 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and the embodied carbon is 13 percent. So those two things combined are 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation is 22 percent. Yes, I think we should be driving e-vehicles, but the built environment is a much bigger nugget to improve the climate.

Speaker 3 34:07

Well, that's pretty educational. When you closed the chapter with structure lamb, you moved into the consulting world. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Speaker 1 34:17

Yeah, it's been fascinating. I've got a wide range of clients that are confidential so I need to preserve the confidentiality, but they're in various areas of the supply chain. I'm supporting a very large general contractor in the Midwest of the United States that's embarking on the mass timber journey. I'm making sure they don't get lost in the mass timber forest because it's really a complicated business and it's new and it's moving fast. There's a lot of things that you can run into trouble on and so I'm helping them with that.

Speaker 1 35:00

I'm also working with some of the leading tech sector companies, helping them navigate the supply chain for mass timber, which is really interesting in the tech sector. They're all very favorable on mass timber because it's a carbon footprint controllable. When they think about their construction, when they think about their built environment, it's one of the controllables they can make a pretty straightforward decision on to build either in mass timber or build in the old concrete and steel format. They're being very noble about their carbon emissions and carbon footprints. It's hard to control where the electricity comes from off the grid Is it renewable, is it fossil fuel-based, is it hydro-based, atomic-based, etc. There's many things that they cannot control, but they can control construction. Seeing these different supply chains from different perspectives, rather than just being a manufacturer of mass timber, is really illuminating. It's really interesting for me to see. I like to think that I can add value to help them navigate through the forest and keep it from being over complicated for them.

Speaker 2 36:23

Would it be the customer or the client that you'd be looking for to help out? Is it the investor, developer going into the final design phase? Or if I wanted to use your resources and your experience, what type of person would I be?

Speaker 1 36:39

Yeah, I think it's a good segue to talk a little bit about the great work that Woodworks has done. Woodworks in the US has done a fantastic job in being that go-to technical resource for designers, architects, engineers. I really don't see myself playing in that space. Woodworks has set up a system, an outreach program. They've got lots of online tools. They do lots of training seminars online and in-person. Woodworks is really helping the part of the messy middle that I spoke about with that whole specification, community and developer outreach and builders, installers, etc.

Speaker 1 37:26

Where I see I apply my skill set is in areas like in the supply chain of some of these significant users, be they people wanting to buy Mass Timber or people that want to build with Mass Timber. But it's also people that want to enter the Mass Timber space and do an investment in building a factory. Those clients range from people that want to invest significant money to build a factory or factories plural or be what I call a value-added reseller, somebody that doesn't want to make the billets of CLT and GLULAM but wants to buy billets, fabricate them, add the custom steel connectors, the pre-engineered steel connectors maybe do some of the 3D design, do the installation, etc. There's people also looking at making investments in that space. The council that I give the latter.

Speaker 1 38:28

So the value-added reseller is just be aware that there is supply issues. If you invest capital in a business that wants to resell and not be a primary producer, you may be hard-pressed to find supply. So it's a chicken and the a. We need both. But supply comes is the price. Yeah, it's just if sawmills decided to not make lumber to make mass timber I'm not saying they would ever do that, but if we didn't have lumber we wouldn't be making much mass timber. Right, this is now the next extension of that.

Speaker 3 39:11

So you've been a part of a lot of different exciting things and participated in so much across the forest products industry, the mass timber industry. What would you consider to be one of your crowning achievements? What's something that you're really proud of?

Speaker 1 39:26

Good question. I've had many, many great moments through my career. I think exposing myself to different markets internationally, and I'll even consider my my move into California was a very experiential move for me. I learned a lot about the U? S Culture, the U S Codes, the way that U? S Supply chains work, the American people. I probably spent more than half my career working in an American environment. That's been very helpful to me.

Speaker 1 40:01

My seven years living in Belgium leading the engineered wood products division for warehouser at that time was also very forming for me as I matured as an executive. In that experience I was actually able to sit around some of the first strategic think tanks for mass timber in Austria and Germany because of the ilk that warehouser had, the credibility that warehouser had, and so I was a part of that. Thinking early days and then working as a consultant has also changed many of my perspectives on different materials, different wood products. And then, certainly I would have to say, the time at Structural Am leading that company through very significant change, getting the winning the confidence of some major companies to build their buildings for them. Those were all really, I would say, capstone achievements in my career.

Speaker 2 41:07

You talked about some of the projects. What are the projects that are? Do you have real world standing projects that you can talk about?

Speaker 1 41:15

In mass timber Structural Am we built the first one of the first mass timber office campuses for Microsoft and Silicon Valley. We worked on Google's very first mass timber campus buildings as well. That was a real feather in the cap, helping contractors, engineers, architects, building owners navigate through those various challenges that come with being in the messy middle A new emerging technology building the factory in Arkansas. In spite of the challenges, there was a lot of lessons learned there that I can honestly say I've paid the education tax for and I'm happy to not do that again, and I can advise my clients either as a consultant or when I step back into the industry in some kind of a mass timber enterprise leading a charge again in that context. There are a lot of things there that I've learned from over the time.

Speaker 1 42:19

But you don't do it on your own. There's no way you can do this on your own. It's too complicated. Building the team around you and in front of you and leading from behind is really also one of the best experiences one can have as an executive, because it's a complex business. It's a project-based business. There's heavy design work, there's heavy mechanical work, there's machinery, there's lumber, there's supply chain. There's so many factors. So you really need to build a team of very talented people, and I think we had that at Structural Amp as we were going through some of that large growth.

Mentors and Mass Timber Industry Impact

Speaker 2 43:02

I wanted to say thank you for mentioning Woodworks woodworksorg. We wanted to say thank you as well. There we have a lot of our sponsors at our mass timber event in Denver last January and they're an absolute wealth of information. So you hit the nail on the head with the messy middle they're a nonprofit for people. Then they'll just give you free advice of just experts in the field to get you going in the right direction. Speaking about different resources and different things to go learn, is there anything that comes to mind that has shaped your, maybe beginning of your professional career or maybe later in life? Any sort of book, podcast show, some sort of course or something that kind of sticks out that changed you and what was that and what was it about that you liked so much?

Speaker 1 43:50

Yeah, I think there's many things that I'd have to reflect on that have formed and shaped me the personal desire to work with people and win and always believe that it's a team sport is so important.

Speaker 1 44:08

But you know, the one point I can touch on is being properly mentored, and I can tell you that I've been the recipient of very good mentoring by some really excellent people in business.

Speaker 1 44:24

Sure, they're great business people, but they're great people first and foremost, and over my time I've had that, the benefit of that, and then I would say, in the over the last 10 or 15 years I've been now trying to pay that forward because I just know how it's helped me over time, and so I really get a big charge out of helping people who are coming into the industry, help them, give them opportunity, help them deal with things and then also see them grow and mature into the next wave of leaders in our industry.

Speaker 1 45:01

And there's a lot of good people in Mass Timber. There are probably a disproportionate amount of good business people in Mass Timber and I think it's because Mass Timber is such a noble cause. It fixes the environment and it helps transform construction and that just inspires a lot of people, young and old, and so that just is a big magnet towards the Mass Timber industry, and that's where I would the answer I would give you on that point you may have found a couple of little ugly ducklings to go under your one-year wings For me and Brady's rise into the Mass Timber world.

Speaker 2 45:42

you might be getting a couple of emails and calls from us.

Speaker 1 45:45

I'd love to help you guys.

Speaker 3 45:47

So, speaking of mentors and teamwork and all of the wonderful people in the Mass Timber world who's inspired you along the way, there's a few people that come to mind in terms of some real serious mentorship.

Speaker 1 46:00

A lot of them were through the Trustroist and Warehouser organization. There was Randy Gorick who is even today still very active as a leadership coach. He was one of my very first mentors. There was Bob Dingman, also from Trustroist. There was Dick Hansen from Trustroist who was passed and is no longer with us. There was Bill Corbin at the Warehouser. There was Bill Blankenship at Warehouser. These were all fine people, great mentors. Then there was Tom Denig. Now Tom Denig was the CEO and president of the Trustroist organization. He actually approved the business plan for Trustroist to go into the European market. When I moved to Brussels lived in the Brussels area for seven years. He was a very strong supporter. He sold the company to Warehouser. He was a great businessman. A US retired Marine did some active duty in Vietnam. He was just a brilliant leader. He just recently passed. He lost a battle with cancer. I'm heading to Boise, idaho, next week to go to his memorial service. Tom was truly a very inspiring leader and a great mentor of mine as well.

Speaker 2 47:17

He sounds like a thoroughbred badass. He would celebrate his existence and people can learn from him. It sounds like a cool guy.

Speaker 1 47:26

He really was. It's going to be a great gathering of people in Boise because, just of his stature as a leader one of the key leaders in the engineered wood products industry it's going to be just great to be there amongst a bunch of the people that he mentored as well.

Speaker 2 47:43

Before we ask our last question where can people find you for consulting questions and getting connected with you?

Speaker 1 47:50

Probably the best thing to do is look me up on LinkedIn, hardy Wensel, that's pretty straightforward or email me at Hardy Wensel at thinkmasstimbercom.

Speaker 2 48:03

Perfect. Let's say you had a magic wand and you could change one thing about the industry. What would you change and why?

Speaker 1 48:11

That's pretty straightforward. I would have to say that the change is use more mass timber. We've got to get ahead of it. The why is we have to deal with our climate imperatives and we also have to make construction more efficient. Mass timber is just such a solution to both of those initiatives. That's really the focus I've got here moving forward.

Speaker 2 48:36

Pour more money on the fire of getting these plants up. We need a couple people out there with a couple more $90 million pockets to get going.

Speaker 1 48:44

For sure we do. We need more plants. We need more investment. We have a lumber resource that is ideal for what we do.

Speaker 1 48:54

I didn't talk about how perfect the North American lumber industry is to fuel a mass timber business. Our lumber industry is so standardized here in North America it's the envy of every European mass timber manufacturer. A lot of people ask me do you need to have a lumber or a sawmill in front of a mass timber plant? My answer is heck no. The reason why I say no is because our lumber is so standardized. It's available everywhere in North America. We know how to use lumber. We know how to make lumber.

Speaker 1 49:34

We have the strongest wood fiber in the world to make mass timber. We have southern yellow pine in the US south and we have doubles per large here in the Pacific Northwest. Those are stronger than any other softwood lumber species there is. We have the ingredients. That's standardized. If you had to have a sawmill in front of every mass timber plant, you'd have to magnify your capital investment by five to make that happen. That's just not going to happen. We've got so much available resource in front of us anyway. That's my story. I'm going to stick to it. It was really great talking with you guys today.

Speaker 3 50:14

Yeah, you too. Thanks for sharing your story, hardy. We really appreciate it. We appreciate you sharing your experience and your thoughts on the mass timber industry. We look forward to catching up soon, you bet.

Speaker 1 50:25

Cheers, bye for now.