Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to another episode of the Worst Advice I Ever Got. I'm your host Sean Taylor, along with my producer jb and today we've got Leroy Height with us. He's the founder of Cutting Edge Firewood, the guy who turned just Firewood into a national luxury brand. And the worst advice he ever got, don't sell your house for fancy firewood. Which, spoiler alert, he absolutely did. And you know what? It ended up changing everything.
This one's about betting on yourself, building grit through failure, and how faith and persistence can turn a crazy idea into a life changing business.
Let's jump in.
Hey, Leroy, thanks for joining us today.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Leroy.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: We have a reputation on this podcast for not beating around the bush and jumping right in. So let's hear your worst advice you ever got.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: The worst advice I ever got was don't sell your house for fancy firewood.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Okay, that is definitely not one I've heard before. That's, that's wild. Gotta be a pretty good story there. Maybe set some context with, you know, for our audience. Let's give them some input here.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Absolutely. I'd had kind of this idea for fancy firewood in my head and, and I was like, dear God, please get this out of my head. It's such a weir thing to be obsessed about. But it wouldn't go away. And I had gotten this new job in two months and my. I had this 93 geoprism with 266,000 miles on it. And my wife and I had joked that when it broke down that I would start the firewood business on the side. Well, it breaks down. And so that Saturday my wife went out of town. I woke up and I'd never done this before. I prayed all day and fasted and I was like, okay, I think God's calling me to start this firewood business. And wife came home, we talked about it, went into work on Monday and they fired me on the spot.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: And so it's like, oh, this isn't going to be full time. I mean part time.
[00:02:12] Speaker C: So you're getting into that. Who's. So I can't imagine too many people are not giving me. But who's are people not on your side even to start like the firewood business?
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Oh yeah, nobody. I mean, my wife supported me, sure. But nobody thought that. Oh yeah, Gucci firewood, that's a great idea. Let's do that.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Okay, where does this idea for fancy firewood come from? I mean, we're just has it more than just firewood. What am I missing here?
[00:02:42] Speaker A: So at the very core, everybody thought firewood was a commodity. But in reality, the reason you have a fire, think fireplace or in a fire pit, is because of the experience.
The flicker of the flame, the crackle, the aroma, the warmth that comes off of the fire. It's kind of like a sunset that hits all five of your senses. It's really that ambiance. And so it's an experience.
And people are willing to pay a premium for a great experience.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Okay, all right, all right.
[00:03:18] Speaker C: So, I mean, it's a good pitch.
Yeah, I mean, I get it.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: I mean, it sounds like nobody thought so at first, right?
[00:03:25] Speaker B: I mean, I really wanted to get into that. I'm like, okay, you probably didn't get me as an angel investor with that pitch right there. Although it was fun, it was good.
But in all seriousness, once the, once the universe decided you were doing this full time and you really decided to pursue it. Talk about the early years.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: I got a personal loan, maxed out as many credit cards as I could get my hands on, really had no idea what I was doing because I kind of got thrust into it. Bought a truck, a trailer, a piece of equipment to be able to do the deliveries. And I got a supplier that just happened to be in metro Atlanta that, that dried out his wood in a big giant oven. And so I got him to keep it in the oven longer and so it was better quality. And. And I just, I figured out everything the hard way. How to sell firewood, how to deliver it in. The first four years were just brutal.
Working 100, 110 hours a week.
Had no idea what I was doing.
Second year, my wife was at home with our oldest, pregnant with our second, working 50 to 60 hours a week in the business while I was gone 100, 110 hours a week. And I was just exhausted, burned out. But that was really good motivation to figure out how to make this better.
[00:04:53] Speaker C: When it takes that long to really, like, get over something, you can start though. That bad advice. You know, the worst advice, obviously that you're talking about now, it can start to creep back in, right? Say, like, maybe they were right. How many maybe they were right moments did you have in that first four years?
[00:05:08] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I had several times when I found myself in the fetal position. One time, one time I found myself in July with $12 and the bank account from a Thursday to a Monday with two kids.
And my wife is a stay at home wife. And so I was the provider. And so it was heavy and it was rough. And I even had some customers in the early years.
Tommy, you know, you seem like a nice kid. And I remember this one customer in particular that was one of my first customers and he said, but this whole fancy firewood thing, it's just not a good idea. You should go ahead and shut it down. Yeah, it was a customer.
[00:05:52] Speaker C: So he even bought it and was like.
[00:05:57] Speaker B: I bet he put it on his tax return as a charitable.
So you, you had to think about quitting? Like it had to be.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Yeah, there were multiple times. But at the end of the day I really felt like it was my calling that this is what God wanted me to do. Kept me going.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: And. And how did your faith community help you? Your wife, your community? Were you leaning into them for support or was it just you one with God?
[00:06:27] Speaker A: I didn't have like a mentor in the early years that was really advising me to lean into that. I had like prayed with some people that said like, give them faith and stuff like that. So indirectly, when I would open up and be like, yeah, I'm a quarter million dollars in credit card debt and I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills this month, they would look at me. Like I said, I'm on crack and I'm okay with it. I think, I don't think it's a big deal. And like their eyes would like, they'd be like, I mean, mouth open, eyes wide. And. And I had people give me Dave Ramsey books.
[00:07:03] Speaker C: Yeah, rich dad, poor dad.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: Wow. Wow.
[00:07:10] Speaker C: You know, so take us at. It's 2017, right? And this is when you're starting to see a little moniker of success. But you need to make more money.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: To change it, kind of. So I actually found we were in a really tight spot where I needed an injection of cash into the business for it to survive. And first I tried to get a second mortgage on my home. Went and talked to 30, 40 banks over two month period. Nobody was interested at all because I was the owner of a fancy firewood business with $250,000.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: With 250 even I had a credit rating.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: 44 actually. I would pay off my credit card debt during the winter and then. And my credit score go like from 300 to like 800. And that's when I would increase my credit card limits and get more credit cards. So increase that line of credit.
[00:08:07] Speaker C: That's sure.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: This is not financial advice for anyone.
Found ourselves in that position, tried to get a second mortgage no one was interested. And I had an epiphany.
Why don't I, you know, I tried to get a second mortgage on, on my house. There's extra equity in the house. Why don't I just sell it and, and take that money and then invest it in the business. So I went to my wife and said, hey beautiful, I know we have a two year old and a three year old little girl at home and you're eight months pregnant with our third. What now be the perfect time to take our house, sell it, take that money, invest it in the business.
And so a few weeks later, at 11:30 at night, my third daughter was born.
And the next morning at 8am I was with a lawyer signing the closing documents for our house.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: Holy crap.
[00:09:03] Speaker C: That's betting on yourself.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: So did you, did your lawyer also have a stack of paperwork next to the house sale that was for the divorce?
Holy cow. Walk us through that moment with your wife. How in the world.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: I have the best wife in the world. When I think when your spouse goes out and does something crazy like this, it can be so hard and so scary, but it's amazing what you can do when your spouse supports you and believes in you and, and that allows me to go out and take some of these crazy risks.
[00:09:43] Speaker C: So you sell the house, you've done it, you got the money. What's that now kind of allow you to get done?
[00:09:49] Speaker A: I rebranded the business, redid the website and then I also reinvented how they do local deliveries. I invented a rack. I had a canvas cover. The rack could be moved by hand truck. And since our firewood was high quality, bug free, it could be stored inside. And when they reordered, we would take the empty rack and replace it with a full one. And so delivery went down from about two hours per delivery once we showed up to about 15 minutes per deliver. Well, that's huge.
And, and it really set it up for a great experience for the customer. And, and it really just set us up for success for the coming years. That really made it explode and actually went national.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: That's awesome. That's great. That's great. Meantime, are you living at your mother in law's place now?
[00:10:45] Speaker A: We moved a rental home for, for the next few sorry few years.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Couldn't resist, man. I could just picture your mother in law on you every day, man.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: Oh please, no, let's not go there.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: So, so in all seriousness, getting back to, getting back to this, this allowed you to do a lot, right? This seemed to be like maybe the thing that, that tipped the business into the ability to scale. What, what happened once you started to be able to put these things to work? Sure came into this.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: Yeah, we started growing fast and we grew. We had very healthy growth the next few years. And then in, in 2019, we started putting yard signs all over metro Atlanta and became very, very well known and, and people started calling us from all over the country asking to order firewood. At first I found it annoying because I'm in Atlanta and I'm like, you're in New York or you're in San Francisco. I can't like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to drive firewood to you. But then I realized, okay, I don't think this is going to work, but we're going to try it out. We started shipping Firewood nationwide and 2019 was perfect timing to start doing that and we kind of got it figured out before what everybody knows happened next year.
[00:12:10] Speaker C: Any growing pains as you're sort of expanding and scaling?
[00:12:15] Speaker A: Growing pains are real. Yeah, yeah, I, we started growing uber fast. We forexed in 2020 over 2019, which is hard in like a software company, but in a company that's high end. So all your employees have to be highly trained, you have to have delivery trucks, you have to have firewood in advance.
It was very difficult to grow that fast. And I kind of got this idea in my head that, hey, now that the company's growing fast, I need to bring in the professional that know how to grow a business the right way.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: How did the experts do?
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Not great. I.
[00:12:59] Speaker C: Second worst piece of advice.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: They did not understand what made the business special, what made it work from top to bottom. They didn't understand it. They came in with all their experience, what had worked in a different industry with a different business and tried to apply it to us and it hurt the business.
[00:13:23] Speaker C: As a gut instinct versus expert advice. Any stories within that?
[00:13:28] Speaker A: One of the biggest things that we did that had a ton of success was we put out these yard signs all over metro Atlanta and they were just our logo, which was very elegant, very pretty, a bit understated, and it helped us grow. About nine out of ten people that we would ask, how did you hear about us? Would at least mention the yard signs and people would post on Nextdoor or on Reddit a picture of the yard sign and say, look at this company littering the area. Which I was like, thank you. Because now hundreds of people have seen our logo. Yeah, exactly. Well, their knee jerk reaction was, oh yeah, we can't do that.
But it brought in millions and crazy amount of cheap branding and brand awareness.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: Interesting. So the experts hated it. Your gut said to do it, you did it. It's bringing in millions.
[00:14:32] Speaker A: Yeah, they kind of, I heard things like, well, Apple and Walmart and Microsoft doesn't do it, so obviously it's not a good idea. Or, you know, it's. That's not, that's not how, that's not how works. I'm definitely an out, out of the box thinker. And they want to take the box and try and fit the firewood, Gucci firewood business into this box, which just wasn't going to work.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: I was really curious about how you hire people because it sounds like, you know, you've got this formula right for how you do things. It's very unique to you. So maybe talk about how you find people and add them to your, to your business.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: Everybody that came in had to have share this passion with us about the customer experience.
And that's really what drove us. It's great to bring in people that have experience, but they have to have the humility to learn the business from the ground up.
After that, I would require them to come in and spend significant time answering the phone and taking orders. I would require them to go out on deliveries and talk to the customers. Because while they were against the yard signs, our customer service representatives and our delivery artisans love them. Because when they would talk to customers, customers would talk about how great they were. They would love the yard signs. And so bringing in people that are willing to learn the business from the ground up was a game changer.
[00:16:04] Speaker C: What is it that makes your firewood fancy? You know, what's the difference between what you do and me cutting a tree down and burning it in my house?
[00:16:13] Speaker A: Yeah, everything.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: You've seen JB with an axe.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: So when I started cutting edge firewood, half of all firewood sold in the United States was infested with bugs. Our firewood, instead of sitting on the ground rotting and growing mushrooms out of it, would go into an oven when it was fresh, and then it would be stored inside. And then it was hand selected and put in a box or in a rack.
Each box and rack had one branded log, and every single rack or box was beautiful. We had an internal mantra that Terry Bradshaw was a customer. And so we'd say, act like every single product leaving our warehouse looked like it was going to Terry Bradshaw. And by the way, when Terry Bradshaw would order, there wasn't an internal memo saying, make sure this is perfect. This is Going to Terry Bradshaw. He got what everybody else was going and we actually did the same thing just to make sure we had perfection. When we would do video, video or photo shoots, they would just take something and so everything that left had to be perfect. All the customer service had to be very top par. And then the, the branding, back that up.
Yeah.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: Oh, wow. What a great journey.
I want you to look back for a minute to that.
Don't sell your house for fancy firewood advice. What do you think about it?
[00:17:41] Speaker A: I think they give advice like that out of fear.
They don't have any experience and so their knee jerk reaction is fear.
And a lot of people give in to that fear. I think that we should encourage people to go out and take risks because even if you fail, a lot of times you can learn more from a failure than from a success.
It can give you grit. And if you go and you try and do something great, it gives you grit, it gives you experience.
You can get a reputation that's a good reputation, even if you fell like at least you're the guy in the arena and you can get connections and it just sets you up for success for your next attempt as long as you don't quit.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: Where do you think this advice being motivated by fear comes from? What do you mean by that?
[00:18:32] Speaker A: We in our culture fear failure. We fear being uncomfortable and fear and avoid pain.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: Pain. Yep.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: Which, everything you want and need in life is on the other side of being uncomfortable and pain. Like you want six pack abs, you got to be uncomfortable and, and it takes a little bit of pain and that's shallow. But like if you want a healthy marriage, if you want to be, if you want to have kids, if you want to start a business, if you want to be, I mean a good athlete, all of it takes sacrifice and pain, being uncomfortable. But on the other side of that is a whole lot of fulfillment. And so it's wild to me that people will say just knee jerk reaction is, no, don't do that because it's, it's not safe or it's risky. You could fail, avoid.
[00:19:23] Speaker C: When people come to you and say, hey, I'm thinking about starting a business and it's a fancy mouse pads, and you're like, I don't understand what you mean. But what do you tell them?
[00:19:32] Speaker A: I tell them, hey, the past could be hard, so think seriously, but go for it.
It's not going to be easy. You're gonna, you're gonna fall, you're gonna fail in certain ways. And whether you succeed or you fail, you're gonna learn so much, and it's gonna make you a much deeper and better person as far as being able to go out and then take your experiences and go further in life.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: What does fancy firewood mean to you? Now? Looking back on all this, I am.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Thankful that God gave me the push and got me to step out in faith, to take a risk, because it changed my life, it changed me. And now I have a great reputation, I have connections, I have experience, and I have grit to now go out and do the next thing.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: That's awesome. That's awesome.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Leroy.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: This was.
This was great, man. I am so glad our.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: Our.
[00:20:43] Speaker B: Our paths intersected. I'm so glad that you came to know the podcast and you came to be a guest on the podcast, because, I don't know, insert your funny pun here, but, uh, people are going to be burning with excitement when they listen to this episode. This was.
[00:20:57] Speaker C: I knew we were gonna do something with firewood.
[00:20:59] Speaker B: I can't help it, man. It's so good.
[00:21:04] Speaker C: Right there.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Leroy, man, thank you. I really, really enjoyed enjoying this time with you. Thank you so much.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: Absolutely. It was absolutely a pleasure. Great conversation.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Man, What a story, JB Selling your house for firewood sounds like the setup of a bad joke, but for Leroy, it became the foundation of a.
[00:21:24] Speaker C: Of.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: Of what's a national brand.
[00:21:26] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, he didn't just talk about firewood, you know, he talks about, like, the experience of it, you know, the crackle and the aroma and the ambience and like, if that's what people were buying from him. And so that what he leaned into to create this pretty cool brand.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: Yeah, he certainly did. Another big takeaway is, I think back through our conversation was his perspective on failure. And he called it. I think grit training is what he called it. And every setback gave him more resolve, more clarity, more connections, you know, and. And. And that's a really interesting perspective.
[00:21:58] Speaker C: Yeah. You know, and let's not forget, none of this happens without his wife saying yes after he pitched the selling of their house while she was 18, 8 months, 21 days pregnant. You know, that's. That's next level support.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
You know, Leroy's story is. Is proof that bad advice rooted in fear can't stop someone who's willing to ultimately risk, learn, and lead with conviction. So, great episode. Thanks to everybody for listening and letting us teach you something through other people's worst advice. It's not something that we take for granted. So thank you and be sure to tune in next week when we come back with another great episode of the Worst Advice I Ever Got.
