Posners in Fast Lane of Forest Products

By P.J. Heller

    Oren and Susan Posner make customer shopping at their business as easy as ordering a meal at a drive-thru eatery.
    Pull into their Eugene. Ore., retail location, place an order from the comfort of your car, and within minutes an enthusiastic employee will have the order loaded and you’ll be on your way.
    Instead of selling burgers and fries, the Posners have built a successful business that sells, among other things, landscape materials including bark, compost, soil amendments and fertilizers, as well as wood pellet fuel and firewood.
    What started as a one-man firewood business in the early 1980s known as Lane Firewood Forest Products, has grown into a business that employs some 130 people and operates all but four days out of the year.
    Today, Lane Forest Products — the word firewood has since been dropped from the name to better reflect its offerings — has a far-reaching impact.
    “We’re a retail company, a commercial company, a wholesale company and an industrial company,” Posner notes. “We do all those things. From selling products in a five-gallon bucket to shipping by rail car, we provide materials all around Oregon and around the western United States.”
    Those not familiar with the Lane Forest name may still be using its landscape materials, which are sold wholesale to some of the largest and best-known garden product companies and then blended into their offerings that are sold on store shelves.
    “If you’re in the central valley of California, you are almost certainly putting our product on your land,” Posner says. “From Alaska to Los Angeles, there’s a really good chance our material is in the gardening products that people are using.”
    To serve the California market after the railroad said it would no longer supply gondola cars to shippers, Lane Forest purchased its own cars. That sort of can-do attitude has been a hallmark of the company since it was founded in the early 1980s.
    When Lane Forest couldn’t find truck equipment for blowing bark mulch and other yard products, for example, it designed and built its own truck blower boxes. In 2001, the company sold the manufacturing rights to the blower boxes to Peterson Pacific Corp., a Eugene-based manufacturer of industry-leading whole tree chippers and debarkers and horizontal grinders. Peterson is now part of Aztec Industries.
    A similar approach was taken when Posner wanted to eliminate plastic from green waste composting.
    “We have a pretty pristine site here,” he notes. “Plastic is just a plague.”
    To alleviate the problem, the company designed a vacuum-type system that helps remove plastic from the compost. "It was so effective that we developed a new entity Hawker Corporation to market the Airlift Separator equipment to other compost facilities around the country".
    “In this industry, because it’s a relatively young industry, you can’t necessarily go to the store and buy what you need,” Posner says. “You have to make it yourself. You need to adapt.”
    Adapting is just what the company has been doing since it was founded. It grew from a business supplying firewood to one that produces, sells and delivers landscape supplies, offers blower services for mulch, soil amendments, planting soils and river rock, and has, since 1993, been handling urban wood waste and composting green waste.
    The urban wood waste is recycled and then sold to particle board and hardboard manufacturers, paper mills and to biofuel plants.
    The company also provides “brown field remediation” services, cleaning up non-toxic mill sites. One of those remediation jobs involved a $2 million contract with Weyerhaeuser.
    Lane Forest operates from an 18-acre retail/recycling/composting site in Eugene (it leases another 10 acres there as well). It also has a five-acre retail/recycling site in Springfield, about 10 miles to the east; a 50-acre compost site in nearby Junction City to the north, and a 20-acre production facility for landscape materials and supplies in Lebanon, located about 35 miles north of Eugene.
    The Lane Forest compost facilities feature large windrows which are turned weekly with an excavator, then screened as well as run under the airlift separator.
    “I started off with a pickup truck and a chain saw,” Posner recalls of his early days, noting that the impetus for that firewood business was simply, “I needed to feed myself.”
    “It just created its own kind of momentum,” he recalls of the firewood days.
    Prior to that, he had worked painting houses on his own.
    He credits much of the growth in sales over the last two decades to his wife and business partner Susan, who he married in the late 1980s. With a background in sales and marketing management she soon had the business moving fast forward.
    “Since then, I’ve just held on and tried to keep up with what she’s done,” Posner says. “She has a real good instinct for what makes people want to buy something. She has a very keen sense of what it takes both visually, verbally and esthetically . . . not just the way it looks but the ‘feel’ of the place.”
    Products developed by Lane Forest now include such catchy titles as “PlayAway Fiber,” which is a wood chip designed to be used under playground equipment; “Frugal Planting Soil,” composed of loam, sand and garden compost, and “Blended Mint Compost,” a combination of sawdust and bark, sand, composted mint straw, horse/steer/chicken manure and garden compost. Lane Forest also custom blends soil amendments for their customers.
    Susan Posner is president of Lane Forest and also runs a small business development division within Lane Forest Products helping like companies with marketing and branding. Oren Posner is Vice president of Lane Forest.
    The company has built a loyal following over its 30 years of operation. Posner says he has followed a simple business philosophy during that time, by providing the best price and best service.
    “We take care of business,” he says. “We have good products at good prices. We’re here seven days a week. We make it very easy for you to order here. If we do something wrong, we make it right. We give people very little reason to not want to buy from us.”
    The business closes on only four public holidays each year, “If we were closed more than that, people would start to get irritated,” Posner says, comparing the business to a utility company.
    “We try to make it user-friendly for everybody,” he adds. “We try to be open and be here for people.”
    In addition to its longtime customers, Lane Forest has longtime and loyal employees, some of whom have been with the company for more than 20 years.
    The Posners hesitate to describe themselves as environmentalists but it is clear that many of their business decisions are based on environmental factors.
    “We’re business people but we choose to do our business in an environmentally friendly field and in an environmentally friendly way,” Posner explains. “We are very principled people. We look at things, and we are very interested in whether they are right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate.”
    One area of growth, for example, involved a request to take their grinders into the woods to grind slash for biofuel plants.
    Before agreeing to take on the project, they researched how much energy would be expended to grind the wood compared to the amount of energy that would eventually be generated. They found that overwhelmingly, more energy would be generated.
    They also compared the amount of pollution that would be generated by burning slash in the woods — as was typically being done — versus the particulate emissions from a biofuel plant. Emissions from open burning would be 100 times greater than from a boiler, they discovered.
    “So environmentally it’s beneficial,” Posner says of the wood grinding. “End of story. We still do it.”
    As for what’s ahead for Lane Forest, Posner says there are plans to expand in the future. At the same time, he doesn’t sound like he’s in too much of a hurry to have it happen.
    “There’s been, and there still are, opportunities for us to grow the business in a dramatic way out of the area and we've chosen not to do that so far,” he says. “There comes a point at which you decide what you want your life to be like and what you want your relationships with others to be like. And for me, I already have 130 employees and I don’t have as close a relationship with a lot of them as I would like to have or that I’ve had in the past.
    “As you grow and start to have multiple locations, it becomes a different type of relationship, a different type of company,” he adds. “We could do that. It wouldn’t be hard to do. I don’t have to and so far I’ve chosen not to.”
    As to the current success of the landscape products business, he has a ready answer.
    “Everything just grew kind of organically,” he says, then adds quickly, “No pun intended.”