A Beautiful Life

His father took a risk and started an accounting firm, with seven kids to support. Two brothers, too, are entrepreneurs. But Tim Blanski goes his own way, dropping out of the high-tech rat race and crafting what he calls “elegant, rustic” furniture on his hobby farm, that finds its way to metro homes from Minneapolis to Miami. His mantra: he prefers not to grow his business, especially “on the backs of others,” as employing people to turn out mass-produced dining tables sounds to him. He is content with the results at The Granary Woodshops, no matter how un-American the no-growth sentiment may sound.

Upsize: Describe your business as it stands today.

Tim Blanski, The Granary Woodshops: I call it hand-crafted elegant, rustic furniture. How I got into it, we had a log cabin built 20 years ago, and always had an affinity for the old style, but not the Minnesota kitsch, more the grand camps of New York.

That morphed into where I am, and The Granaray Woodshops is niched to hand-crafted furniture made from antique salvaged lumber. I just stumbled into some old wood. People always are looking for that classic style. Not that I’m a particular green freak but I have grown into this niche. At shows, other woodworkers always come up to me. They understand the challenges of working with wood that’s not straight.

It’s become a real passion, and part of the interesting piece of what I do as a business. I’ve been at it 12 years and I still pinch myself and think it’s amazing that I can do it.

Upsize: Where do you find your old wood?

Blanski: Sourcing it is interesting. I’ve taken down a barn a year for the past six years. I took one down last year in Lanesboro; it had never been painted. When I drove up I could literally see the knots protruding, and I thought I could never make this work. But the boards were two inches thick; there was a ton of beef left into the board. To be able to talk about the story about that building and the family—a little card comes with each piece I make—people love to know the story.

Upsize: Why do your customers like that so much?

Blanski: I think it connects them with a piece of the past. For one, we have a rural history and a farming history in the Midwest. And It’s amazing how many people I come across that say, Oh, my grandparents still live on their farm. They see my passion for it, and they see the beauty of it. In their mind they see this old, weathered falling-down barn, and then in front of them is what I call the elegant, rustic piece of furniture.

Upsize: Why have you settled on this niche?

Blanski: There are two parts. One, just by looking at pieces others make, I wanted to differentiate myself from rustic. You say rustic and they see that big pine and cedarwood furniture. I don’t make that kind of furniture. I don’t try to make cabin furniture. 60 percent of my furniture is in metro homes, from Minneapolis to Miami.

Upsize: You have a background far removed from this.

Blanski: My employment history started in IT, information technology. I was a programmer, up through systems analyst and project manager, then moved into sales. My selling career eventually was as director of sales for technology services. I love the marketing part. My strength is my sales, and my ability to tell the story. I like that part. It’s a really interesting development that what I do melds together with my passion for talking about the history and telling the story about the wood. It’s not my story, it’s about the wood.

Upsize: What’s one of those stories that stands out to you?

Blanski: The first one that pops in my head: I don’t know if you know Jan Smaby, she used to host a PBS show. I ran into her in Lanesboro, and her grandfather used to homestead there. She was fawning over my furniture. She said, My grandfather has a barn, it’s basically gone. She said, do you have any ideas of how you could tell the history? She brought me a piece of wood and it was too far gone to make furniture, but it was adorable that she bought me this piece of junky wood. But we made 30 pens from the wood, from a building that was built in 1865. She gave a pen and a case to everyone in her family.

Upsize: How did you make the transition from IT to this?

Blanski: I’m a scavenger by nature, so going back to 1999, 2000, 2001, I read the want ads cover to cover every Sunday, I’d read the hobby columns, antique columns. At the time it was the beginning of the end for technology. I was part of the go-go hopeful part of the business—the ‘we’re all going to get rich on stock options’ and never did. That was beginning to crumble. I think subconsciously I was reading and casting a little differently.

Lisa Catton, my wife, and I had just sold our house and moved a block over in St. Paul, to our dream house. We were there less than a year, and I saw an ad in the want ads, for a hobby farm for sale in southeast Minnesota. I said, That’s awesome, and she said, Whatever. It got to be spring and I said let’s take a drive and look at that farm. She said OK. We did that, we drove out here, and we spent two hours here and it just gripped us. We were both working at the time. We were driving down the driveway leaving and she said, Are we making an offer tonight or tomorrow? It was unebelievable, It was calling to us. We sold our house, quit our dream jobs and moved down here without a way to make a living.

Upsize: Why do you think it was calling to you?

Blanski: There’s not a single answer to that; probably it’s a tapestry. One of them is, Lisa’s dad had worked two jobs in his life, for NSP and 3M. And they were travelers, him and her mom, and looked forward to doing a lot more of that, and he retired. 18 months later he was diagnosed with cancer and another three years he was dead. I think both of us saw that and said, There’s a lot of life to live still, and there are just no guarantees.

Another thread is the pressure and the environment back then. More, more, more. Faster, faster, faster, especially in sales. We would be growing at a a record pace and then it’s, What are you going to do for me next year? Lisa was an IT project manager, the same thing. That’s exhausting. I think whether it’s consciously or subconsciously, it’s like we’re done with that.

Upsize: How long did it take you to create the business?

Blanski: It was a slow process, like any big move. We spent all the money we had kind of getting going. I think it was a slow evolution. We moved down there and Lisa found some remote contracting positions from home. I started out making garden benches and bird houses, anything to generate revenue. I quickly discovered what I wanted $100 for, farmers were selling for $15 at fairs and rummage sales.

I started doing bigger shows, like the Minneapolis Home & Garden Show. At the point when I started to move away from too rustic pieces, and started to do elegant pieces, I met a guy who came in and he said how much is this, and I said $995. He said, your prices are too low. I said, half the people roll their eyes when they see my prices He said, look, I’ve been in retail for 35 years. Something you need to understand is these people are not your customer.

He said, you have a unique talent and a craft that I haven’t seen people present. A big light went off in my head; I realized it was kind of true. He said you have a talent, you need to focus on your market and who your market is. The customer who’s gong to buy this, it’s going to be a couple and they’ll stand there and say do you like it, do you like it, and they’ll decide and then they’ll ask how much is it. The price is not as big of an issue. That’s when I started focusing on fewer pieces, higher prices. That probably was part of the launch.

It goes back a little to strategy or accidental strategy. My most popular things are harvest tables, 12 foot, 13 foot dining tables. I’ve got tables in midtown Manhattan. They find me on the web and they love these. I think I could ramp this up and hire people and sell lots of these tables. To me that smells like trouble. I guess the question is why would I? Because I want to build something? Because I want to build a company to make more money on the backs of somebody else? I want to wake up every day and make something. That’s in the blood of my family.

Upsize: Your family members are entrepreneurs.

Blanski: Gene Blanski is my father, and he founded an accounting firm, BPK&Z Accounting. It’s probably in my blood. My brother Chuck has Crescent Products and Zebra Mats; he’s like the nation’s No. 1 maker in floor mats in mixed martial arts clubs. Through the recession it was a growing industry. There’s seven of us kids in the family. I didn’t even mention my brother, Tom, in Fort Lauderdale. He’s in business in glass-glazing, mirrored walls.

Upsize: Was your father influential?

Blanski: Yes, but not in an overt way. My dad’s been influential in a lot of ways. He’s a CPA, he’s a bean counter from the get-go. That was pounded into us as kids, when we opened up our passbook savings account at Midwest Federal. If there’s a way to save a dollar, he’s all over it. Planning, budgeting, that was all part of what he taught.

Upsize: What does he think of your business?

Blanski: This is probably to this day more a dream to him; he probably shakes his head. But he quit one of the big firms and started his own while he still had three or four kids at home, if not more, and that was a big risk. Risk-taking, adventure-seeking, they’re in my blood and in Lisa’s blood probably more than everybody in the family.

We are adventure seekers both of us, in every way. We’re global travelers when we can. We travel off the beaten path when we can. We quit two jobs when we were making more money than we could spend to come down here and make a living. We got into horses and chickens and goats without knowing anything about it. We’re not afraid of it. The first few years I’d tell about doing this, and people would hang on every word. People love the fact that we were corporate escapees at the time.

Upsize: Where are you going with your company?

Blanski: In the early days, when we were in IT, it was all about accumulation, accumulating enough assets to retire on. That was exhausting, too. Where I’m taking the business is sort of tied to that. I want to be able to do this at our pace. Lisa still does some consulting part time. There’s a lot more we could do on marketing and contact management stuff. Our goal is to get her full-time working with the Granary, and it becomes just a business for just the two of us, that we can do forever. I look at retirement differently now, and it’s a good thing. It all comes back to this accidental strategy. If I can find a way to make $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 extra a month, working on a passion, I can do that until  I die. I would love to do that until I die.

Upsize: Why is that important to you?

Blanski: It’s an interesting time. I don’t know what you see, but there’s a lot of press looking at our generation—I’m 53—looking at retirement differently, and our expectations changing and blah blah blah.  I know it’s a radical story. Someone could say there’s nothing entrepreneurial about not growing a business. I’m not necessarily going to argue with that. But for me, what a beautiful trend.

If you came here, to Spring Grove—you have to come in the spring. It’s a beautiful farm and a beautiful setting and a historic space. Living in the country, working in the country, discovering these buildings, using this wood—I have met the salt of the earth

I was afraid of small towns, that everyone would know your business. That’s nonsense. It’s very different and we love it. Is your career a lifestyle? It is, because you spend a lot more time at your career than you do at anything else. For me, being able to do this, and building a company for the two of us—we’re there. We made it.

Tim Blanski

Tim Blanski is owner of The Granary Woodshops:  507.498.3086;
timb@catton.com; www.granarywoodshops.com