By Guy Phillips, CEO of Highland Heritage Woodworks
Most people like the idea of running a sustainable business. It sounds good, doesn’t it? Green kit, local materials, doing things the right way
What they don’t always talk about is the fact it can put significant pressure on your cash flow. We’ve felt that first hand at Highland Heritage Woodworks. Right from the start, we knew we didn’t want to build the usual kind of business. We weren’t interested in being the cheapest. We weren’t chasing speed. We weren’t here to pile it high and flog it cheap.
We wanted to do things properly work with good people, use the best local timber we could find, and leave things better than when we found them. But I’ll be honest doing it that way comes with a cost. Especially in the early days.
Starting Small, Thinking Big (Eventually)
When we got going, we were a team of five with a decent workshop, some tools, and a pretty simple goal: make good things, from good wood, for good people. Armands, my business partner, already had a well-respected master carpentry business, and a reputation for proper craftsmanship. That was the keystone this whole thing was built on.
We wanted to have control and transparency of our raw material from the get go and so started our journey with a modest petrol sawmill, so we could work directly with trees from our local forests a petrol sawmill was not ideal, but it’s what we could afford just to see if there was an appetite for local, homegrown timber. And it turns out, there was.
People liked knowing where their timber came from and they liked dealing with people who actually cared about the material. That early response gave us confidence. But it also set us on a path that was going to get a lot bigger (and a lot more expensive) than I first imagined.
The Hard Decisions Come Early
We realised pretty quickly that if we wanted to scale this thing to create decent rural jobs and to do justice to the timber we were working with we were going to have to invest. And not just in kit, but in values.
That meant:
- Investing in an electric powered sawmill that could handle logs up to 1.2m in diameter, 9m long, and 3-4 tonnes in weight
- Creating a new sawmill facility as close to our workshop as possible to minimise the impact of transportation
- Using the lowest carbon solutions whenever possible in the fit out of our sawmill facility whether that be innovative Recycl8 Ltd concrete, recycled steels or re-purposing an unloved agricultural building
- Running our kiln on biomass, not diesel
- Hiring carefully, at the right time and building a quality team
- Investing in proper big-section oversized logs, unloved by the industry as being too difficult to process, but which deliver fantastic quality timber – harder work but it’s all about getting the best outcome for our Scottish timber
It also meant, for the first 18 months or so, Armands and myself didn’t take a wage.That’s not a sob story it was a choice. But it does give you a pretty clear head when you’re working out what matters.
Scaling Slowly (and Feeling Every Step)
Getting to where we are now has been a case of leaning into the stretch. Take our new sawmill, for example. We could have gone cheaper. We could have gone for an upgraded petrol-powered mill. But we didn’t.
Instead, we invested with help from Scottish Enterprise in a cutting-edge electric Mebor sawmill, running on a 100% renewable energy tariff.
Same story with the kiln. We wanted a cutting edge kilning system that would complement the output from our mill and give us a competitive advantage and so went for an 80m3 automated system from SECAL . Now we could’ve then just put in a diesel boiler system to provide the heating for the kiln for about £10,000 to keep costs down. Instead, we invested over £160,000 in a fully integrated biomass plant, using our own sawdust and offcuts to dry our timber.
Cleaner. Greener. Properly circular.
But, and here’s the real truth, those decisions make your cash flow properly squeak for a while!
The Payoff Starts To Show
The good news is, those hard choices start to pay for themselves and not just morally.Because when a local authority or architect comes to us asking about our net zero story, we’re not just pointing to our net zero report. We’re showing them the yard, every bit of our kit and how we operate reflects what we care about.
We’re now working on proper large-scale projects, mass timber, architectural builds — and we’ve grown rapidly over the last few years, 35% year on year with plans to triple our growth over the next 12 months. Which, frankly, is enough.
We’ve gone from five people to a team of ten. We’re able to pay fair wages. And we’ve invested nearly three-quarters of a million quid into green kit that lets us do this properly.
Not bad for a rural workshop that started out making staircases (which we still love to do by the way).
The Help That Made It Possible
I’d be daft not to mention the help we’ve had along the way. Scottish Enterprise provided a grant that helped us invest in the sawmill with a target of growing our business and creating quality local jobs and we are well on the way to achieving that.
Scottish Forestry supported us with funding towards our Kiln at a time when this was just a plan on paper. And Opportunity North East closed the final cash gap.
THE ENERGY SAVING TRUST LIMITED backed us with a loan to help fund the biomass kiln. Without that, we’d have struggled to make the numbers work.
Business Gateway gave us, and continues to give us solid advice and helped us think through strategy.
And that’s the thing; Scotland’s an exceptional place to build a values-led business, if you’re doing it for the right reasons. There’s help there, but only if your plans are real
What I’ve Learned (The Hard Way)
Building a sustainable business isn’t about perfection. It’s about making decisions you can stand by. Sometimes that means slower growth. Sometimes it means sleepless nights over cash flow. Sometimes it means doing the thing that’s harder, because it’s better. But long term? It sets you apart.
Customers notice. Partners notice. And most importantly, your own team notices. And that’s what turns a small rural carpentry business into something bigger not just in size, but in impact.
And finally it’s about the small to medium (SME) business making the changes that quite frankly the larger companies struggle with. It’s easy to point the finger at the mega companies and corporations and say ‘you make the change’, but as SME’s we are so much more nimble, have less layers and can make quicker decisions. It’s up to us to show the way and not hang around for others to change!
Guy Phillips is the CEO of Highland Heritage Woodworks — a master carpentry, sawmill and cabin design & build business based in Northeast Scotland. They specialise in high-quality, sustainably sourced Scottish timber for carpentry, construction, cabins and architectural projects.