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Terran Arwood, president of Woodland Tree Service is located in Memphis TN. He has been in business since 2003 when a major windstorm devastated Shelby County, and he was working a job at a college. He and his roommates had some chainsaws and they started helping the area recover from the destruction. Born and raised in California, Terran, and been around tree-related work his entire life and it’s become his way of life. He gained a lot of knowledge of the giant sequoia trees with his friends and family in that business. Trees grow bigger and faster in Memphis than other places in the country, the amount of rainfall and weather is what allows them to grow so fast. Terran describes Memphis as an urban forest in itself. Something he notes as great for his business is when he started purchasing cranes, and Woodland Tree Service became well known for storm response early on. He had originally processed trees that they removed into firewood, which became a lucrative business thanks to BBQ restaurants which are huge in Memphis. They sometimes made almost half a million dollars in profit from those sales alone but they still had a load of material left around. Terran’s strong environmentalist background means that he has a hard time with removing trees, but if he has to, he wants to make sure it’s worth it. Luckily being paid for the material that he collects, rather than needing to pay to dump it, allows him to have a good business model with strong eco-friendly practices. Terran speaks about the fact that Woodland Tree Service staffs 40-50 employees on the tree service side and 8-10 on the wood product side of things. They like to get the misfit wood, the weird stuff, and degraded twisted trees. The bottleneck in their business has always been the difficulty of drying the wood, especially the thicker stuff. Originally they were using air drying, which was taking forever. The game-changer was getting an iDRY kiln that truly unclogged that bottleneck just by speeding everything up. A big factor for Woodland Tree Service’s local support is that they are located approximately an 8-10 hour drive between the majority of the population of the state. They want to significantly grow their business by offering the kiln-dried slabs to various woodworkers around Tennessee. Terran is hoping to be able to provide these slabs through a franchise model or direct to consumers now that they’re able to ramp up their drying process. If Terran is able to up their distribution level with the huge influx of material that they get through the busy season they would like to stabilize their business in the offseason by offering wood to other businesses. Treework is highly competitive, busy, and dangerous, so getting into a division that would offer less competition and more stability would benefit them enormously. Recently Woodland Tree Service has been focused on live edge slabs, and with decreasing drying time thanks to the iDRY kiln, they’re looking to do more dimensional wood in the native species of Memphis. The company will occasionally order in exotic stuff for accents with things they build, but it’s uncommon. A large amount of the business they are starting to receive comes from the restaurant business which Terran believes is due to the competition of that industry, and a lot of builders and architects are specifying materials from them in the Memphis area, which has seen a lot of growth in the last 6-7 years.  Woodlandtree.com @woodlandtreeproducts