Building On Experience with John Stene of Stene Woodwork LLC

Welcome to Building a Furniture Brand with Ethan Abramson, the show that talks about the business behind the furniture business. In this episode, Ethan sits down with John Stene, owner of the Joliet, Montana-based furniture company, Stene Woodwork, LLC.

If you ask John what his company is all about, he would probably say something like, “It is based on the goal of quality building and customer service.” Both are things that many people strive for in their business, but very few succeed at. As you will hear in this episode, he achieves these goals in a very calculated way.

John knows his personal worth and the worth of learning from people who came before him. He’s not interested in reinventing the wheel. He’s interested in incorporating his years of knowledge into running a profitable and long-term company. Follow along as John and Ethan talk about what it takes to start your own business, the importance of learning from the older generation, how to improve a pricing model, and much more.

Keep Learning Along the Way

John began his woodworking pursuits at a young age. His father owned and ran a cabinet shop in Joliet, Montana, where John’s business operates currently. He was around five or six when he started spending time in the shop with his father. At that point, most of his time was spent sweeping, cleaning up, and watching his dad work.

Over time, he started to help his dad with planing or sanding boards and worked up to the point where they would build kitchens together when John was around eighteen and nineteen years old during summers between school years.

Soon after, John moved away to Canada, where he married his wife. While living up north, John worked in a couple of commercial cabinetry shops and a residential cabinetry shop and generally spent much of his time building kitchens.

“I started working in the shop, building kitchens, doing custom woodwork, feature walls, custom countertops, railings, stairs, interior doors, basically anything that would be put into a commercial space. Everything from laminate cabinets to high-end, solid wood stairs. I did basically everything. 

Then I moved from being in the shop to being on-site, doing a lot of site installs, and in my time with this one shop, I think within the eight years I worked there, I installed around 450 kitchens. I was just going a mile a minute with a lot of deadlines, a lot of work that had to be met. 

I kept learning along the way. How different companies did business, how different companies interacted with each other on job sites, how the general contractor would interact with the sub-trades. I would spend a lot of time with the general contractors, superintendents, and project managers at lunch, and I would observe their frustrations with sub-trades. 

I learned what to do to make the project managers and superintendents happy and how I could work with other trades on the job site. And that geared my mind towards how to serve a client that isn’t just a person but a bigger business. Which trickles down into just being personable, willing to help, being able to observe a need, and finding a way to meet that need to serve the person that I’m working with.”

• John Stene

Transitioning from Employee to Owner

A significant part of John’s business is customer service. When starting his own business, he needed to keep the lessons he learned from his time as an employee and translate them into his new role as a business owner. However, he explains that part of understanding that transition is understanding the mindset of an employee.

John believes that employees work hard to get their money. The only reason an employee decides to go out on their own is if they feel they aren’t being compensated well enough for their work, they have a problem with authority at the workplace, or they have become so good at what they do that the people above them don’t challenge them anymore.

For John, it was a combination of those factors. He remembered he was promised a particular raise, and it did not come through when he was promised, which broke the trust with his employer. Immediately, he started doing side jobs, though he ran into hurdles right away.

“It’s rocky, to begin with. People just jump into it with no experience business-wise, and they think that because they’re good employees, they’ll make a good businessman. Or they think that because they can produce a good product, that means that they’ll be successful. There’s a big knowledge gap between an employee who does good work and a business owner that does good work. 

I like to look at people who are successful and see what they do. A lot of them start small, and then they jump into it. I did side jobs where I would learn how to interact with customers and learn customers’ expectations. Since I talked with the general contractors, project managers, designers, architects, and that type of stuff, I knew what they wanted. And I learned how to help them to get what they wanted.”

• John Stene

Look to Unconventional Sources of Information

When asked by Ethan what advice he has for other business owners looking to start or improve their business, John advises people to look to unconventional sources of information. When he began, the unconventional sources of information were books. John’s source of info was the job site or in-shop experience from other people, but that proved to be insufficient in the long run.

“To expand my horizons, I look to books. One great book is called Encyclopedia of Furniture Making, or the Encyclopedia of Furniture. It is a wealth of knowledge. It talks about everything from how a log is sawn, how the material is produced, and how the material will respond to expansion and contraction. 

I was in this industry for so long before I understood expansion and contraction and why it happens, and that is such a big part of furniture making. If you’re going to jump into furniture, that’s great. Learn expansion and contraction, or else you’re going to build something, and it’s going to twist and warp and contract. 

Books are a great resource, but also look to older guys. Look to folks who are doing a really good job, not just doing a good job promoting themselves but actually doing good work. Look at other places than people that are the same place as you. If you are in your garage, making furniture, and you want to expand and do a better job, look to people who are not still working in their garage. 

Look to people who are working in big shops, look to people who haven’t just started woodworking in the last ten years, because I don’t care who you are, I don’t care how much you’ve done. If you’ve only been doing it for the last ten years, you have massive gaps in your knowledge and your knowledge when it comes to the industry.”

• John Stene

Website: https://www.stenewoodwork.com

Instagram: @stenewoodwork