The answer was different.
But the business was not finished.
The wholesale panel line continued operating.
Contractors working on permitted new construction continued buying cedar panels for projects already underway.
Then something happened Lana had not predicted.
In retrospect, it made complete sense.
People who were suddenly spending nearly all of their time at home began paying attention to their houses in ways they had never had time to do before.
Closet organization became a national obsession.
People emptied shelves.
Reorganized clothes.
Discovered old storage problems.
And many noticed for the first time how much they disliked the wire shelving or aging particle-board systems they had lived with for years.
Traffic to Lana’s website tripled between March and June 2020.
Requests for future installations accumulated faster than she could answer them.
Eventually, she hired a part-time office manager simply to handle inquiries.
Lana was 33 years old.
She had been running the company for eleven years.
She had never maintained a significant conventional marketing budget.
Her biggest challenge during the spring of 2020 was handling demand that seemed to arrive on its own.
The installation backlog created during the shutdown carried the company into summer and autumn.
Despite losing months of normal installation activity, Dickstra Cedar Works finished 2020 with annual revenue around $312,000.
That figure matched the earlier record year of 2014.
The parallel was not lost on Lana.
She mentioned it to Garrett during a phone call in December.
“Two crises, same result,” he said.
“Different crises. Same product.”
“That’s what I meant.”
That was about as philosophical as Garrett Dickstra usually became on the telephone.
Then, in February 2021, the business encountered the problem the entire previous twelve years had quietly been building toward.
The Musgrave Pencil Company announced that it would close its Shelbyville processing facility.
The announcement was brief.
Corporate.
Consolidation of operations.
Efficiency improvements.
Relocation of certain production functions.
For Lana, the meaning was much simpler.
The source of cedar that had anchored her cost structure for twelve years was going away.
The facility was scheduled to close in September.
The deliveries would stop.
The unusually inexpensive cedar that had made Dickstra Cedar Works possible at its earliest stage would no longer arrive at the workshop.
Lana called Don Crowley.
He was retired and living in Tullahoma.
“I heard,” Don said. “I’m sorry, Lana.”
“Don’t be.”
There was a pause.
“Tell me where the cedar goes.”
Don understood what she meant.
The mill’s remaining cedar billet inventory, the raw material the Shelbyville facility had been processing, was being sold off.