By Guy Phillips, CEO of Highland Heritage Woodworks
Every so often someone asks: “Now that you’ve grown, have your motivations changed?”
It’s a fair question. Growth does funny things to businesses. You get more machines, more people, bigger contracts, and before you know it, the thing you started can feel a bit far away.
But for us, the answer’s simple: our purpose hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s got clearer.
We’re still here to do two things:
- Create proper rural jobs that people can be proud of
- Get better outcomes for Scottish timber, from forest to frame
That’s been the compass since day one. And it still is.
Jobs That Actually Matter
Let’s start with people.
We’re now a team of 10. Not a huge outfit, but big enough that culture matters. Every hire counts. And every new person has to believe in what we’re doing or it doesn’t work.
The goal has always been to create decent, skilled, rural jobs. Not just stopgap labour. We’re talking careers, work you can take pride in, work that requires both hands and head, and work that connects you to the land around you.
That’s what drew me in originally. Armands and the crew had already built something solid with their carpentry, a master-level team doing brilliant work with proper materials. I just wanted to find a way to get more of that craft out into the world, and in the process, create more livelihoods for people who don’t want to move to a city just to find work.
Why Rural Work Still Matters
I live in Northeast Scotland. And like a lot of rural areas, it’s seen its fair share of decline — young people leaving, traditional trades dying out, not much on offer apart from low-wage seasonal work.
Timber gives us a chance to flip that.
When done properly, timber is slow, steady, regenerative work. It rewards patience and skill. It keeps people close to where they live. And it builds value that sticks around, not just in the buildings, but in the people who made them.
That’s the kind of work we want to offer.
We don’t run training programmes with handbooks and HR lanyards. But we do pass on real skills. We show people how to read a board, use a chisel properly, run a sawmill, dry timber with care, build something solid.
That kind of knowledge doesn’t come from PowerPoint. It comes from being in the yard. And that’s the kind of learning we still believe in.
Better Wood, Better System
The other half of this is the timber itself.
Scotland has incredible trees. You don’t always hear that, because the system’s built around fast-growing spruce, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it has its place.
But we’re after something different. We work with slow-grown Douglas Fir, Scots Pine, Oak, Elm, Ash. Stuff with tight grain, high heartwood, strength, beauty — the kind of material you build things from that are supposed to last.
The tricky bit? It’s not always easy to get hold of.
That’s why we work closely with local foresters and landowners, especially those doing continuous cover forestry. We’re looking for mature trees, selectively felled, from forests that are managed with long-term thinking.
And we’ve invested in the kit to make the most of them:
- A sawmill that handles up to 1.2 metres in diameter and 9 metres long logs
- A biomass kiln that dries timber using our own sawdust and offcuts
- Skilled people who know how to get the best out of every board
We also pay more for logs that don’t fit the usual spec — big, gnarly, hard-to-handle ones — because that’s where the character is.
Local Timber, Local Impact
When we buy a tree from down the road, that money stays in the local loop — the forester, the haulier, the landowner. When we process it ourselves, the value stays in the yard. When we sell it to architects or builders, we’re helping them hit their carbon goals without compromising on quality.
It’s not just about what we make. It’s about who benefits.
And the more we grow, the more we want that growth to lift everyone in the chain.
The Long Road (And Why It’s Worth It)
None of this is quick. Or easy.
We’ve turned down faster money. We’ve delayed hiring. We’ve stretched cash flow to make the right decisions on kit. We’ve walked away from projects that didn’t sit right with us.
But we’ve never wavered from the two questions that keep us straight:
- Does this create meaningful work?
- Does this make better use of Scottish timber?
If it’s not a yes to both, it’s not for us.
Final Thoughts
Our motivations haven’t changed.
If anything, they’ve sharpened. Because we’ve seen the impact this kind of business can have, not just on the bottom line, but on the people who work here, the forests we draw from, and the buildings that stand at the end of it.
We didn’t set out to make a statement. We just wanted to do things right.
And we still do.
Guy Phillips is the CEO of Highland Heritage Woodworks, a master carpentry, sawmill and cabin design and build business based in Northeast Scotland. They specialise in high-quality, sustainably sourced Scottish timber for carpentry, construction and architectural projects. #ScottishTimber#RuralJobsMatter#SustainableForestry#LocalCraftsmanship#HighQualityWoodwork