Including the phrase college project.
Inga closed her book.
“So you’ll use what’s already on the property line.”
At that point, approximately two tons of cedar slat scrap had accumulated on or near the Vandermir property line from previous dump runs.
Lana had not processed all of it because she had been waiting to secure a formal supply agreement.
Her mother’s point was simple.
She did not need one yet.
Lana had wood.
She had the shed.
She had the saw, router, and sander.
She had already sold twelve kits.
And she had a customer asking for more.
Lana started milling again the next morning.
Then, in March 2009, the dump truck arrived.
Four more tons.
She did not return to Chuck Severt’s office.
She did not write an angry letter.
Instead, Lana spent three days with her notebook calculating exactly how many closet kits she could produce from four tons of slat scrap, what those kits could retail for, and how long she might need to sell them through the channels she already had.
When she finished, the number was approximately 340 kits.
At an average retail price of $180, that represented $61,200 in potential retail revenue from wood that had been dumped beside her property by a mill whose manager had called her idea a college project.
She wrote $61,200 at the top of a new page.
Then she underlined it once.
Lana called Heirloom Home in Prairie du Sac.
“Could you take twenty kits a month?”
“We’ll try ten.”
She called two more kitchen-and-bath showrooms in Madison.
One declined.
The other told her to bring six kits and they would see what happened.
She drove to a home-improvement trade show in Milwaukee with four kits in the back of her pickup.
Her display consisted partly of a folding table borrowed from her church.
For two days, Lana talked to nearly everyone who stopped.
She came home with fourteen orders.
She also came home with the names of two regional distributors who told her they had heard of her.
Lana knew they probably had not.
She wrote down their names anyway.
By the end of 2009, Lana had sold ninety-four kits through four retail accounts and direct sales.
Gross revenue was $16,920.
Her raw material cost was effectively zero.
Operating expenses, including saw blades, router bits, sandpaper, cardboard, and gasoline, came to about $2,340.
Lana cleared approximately $14,580 in her first serious year.
She did it from a converted equipment shed on a ninety-acre farm in Sauk County using material a pencil mill had treated as waste.
Garrett looked at the year-end numbers.
“That’s not bad.”
In Garrett Vandermir’s language, that meant he was impressed and had no idea how to say it.
In 2010, Lana hired her first employee.
His name was Marcus Johansson.
He was nineteen, the son of a neighboring family, needed work, had good hands, and did not ask unnecessary questions.
Lana taught him how to run the table saw and router table and how to sand the cedar panels to the finish standard she had developed.
The panels were left unfinished rather than sealed so the aromatic cedar surface remained exposed.