She's no lumberjack, but Emma Woods is a top class sawmill owner.
Pull into Duncombe Sawmill in Helmsley, North Yorkshire and you may catch a glimpse of a slim, blonde haired woman making her way across the yard. You might think she's a customer. You’d be less likely to guess that she's the owner. Yes; Emma Woods is a fully paid-up sawmill boss.
The timber business doesn't seem the first choice of business for a woman, particularly one whose previous job was curating the Queen's silver collection, and when Emma took over the sawmill in 2003, many locals and some staff thought she'd made an odd decision. Seven years on there are less raised eyebrows. She's saved a long established business, over 100 years old, and many staff have kept their jobs. The girl's done good and earned her stripes. So much so that in 2009 she was named Entrepreneur of the Year at the Yorkshire Rural Awards.
Emma was a customer and she heard the sawmill was about to close. It was a failing business, making a loss, and she was looking for a challenge. "I think it just seemed a good opportunity to give it a try, do something different and stretch myself. At that point she'd only ever run her own antique silver business; a small concern with no employees. Emma admits there were 'a couple of major challenges'. "People were very sceptical, there was an awful of 'oh it won't last'. I was entering a male environment with a lot of people who’d been working there over 30 years." She says, "It was tricky dealing with customers because I didn’t know anything about the product." And in those early days her lack of experience fed rumours that the mill was going to close. But the gossip mongers hadn't bargained on Emma's tenacity. "I'm certainly a sticker," she comments. "I do put my all into things, and I'm a hard-worker."
When Emma walked into Duncombe Sawmill as the owner she admits she was 'naive about the challenges'. "Helmsley was very scary, a minefield. I knew nothing about it." However, her 'clarity of thought' and 'attention to detail' soon kicked in. "I thought there wasn't any logic to how the business ran," she says. "Fairly basic things hadn't been done." She 'rejigged an accounts package into a larger format' and drew on her father's expertise as an accountant. The family affair also extends to her mother, a garden designer, who provides Emma with inspiration on the garden furniture front.
The client base has completely changed since Emma took over the business. A website was set up five years ago, which was something a bit different at the time for a sawmill. But it's proved very successful. "Originally the clients were trade only," she says, "whereas now about 60% of our customers are the general public. This has been helped by doing some local marketing and the fact that we make bespoke products to suit customers' needs. We also introduced an installation service 18 months ago so that people can have all their fencing done with just one phone call."
Much of the timber cut at Duncombe is locally sourced within a 25 miles radius. Some comes from Scotland and it's all British. Sourcing the wood responsibly is very much part of the company's ethos. Modern technology uses lasers to cut the timber. But the gates and panels are handcrafted and handmade in the same way they’ve been for the last 30 to 40 years.
At Duncombe they make a lot of agriculture and garden fencing. Emma's role takes in marketing, finance, figures and much more. Now she can even talk expertly about timber. It is, as she says, "A million miles away from what I was doing before."
Arts and antiques were the gleam in Emma's eyes before the world of timber beckoned. A degree followed by an MA at the V&A Museum in the history of design fuelled her artistic passion. She trained as an apprentice for three years in gilded furniture, creating oriental lacquer. After that came that antique silver business, working with private collectors. It was a need for change that prompted her decision to buy Duncombe - that and a desire to have the flexibility to spend more time with her two girls. As she says, "I now have much more control of my time."
The huge learning curve that Duncombe presented was one of the things Emma particularly enjoyed. In the beginning she 'was very cautious about making changes'. In retrospect she says she should have made more at the start. It's advice she may well apply to the former Dales Timber site in Pickering, which she picked up last year. Like Duncombe this was also a failing business, about to go into liquidation. With the two sites, Duncombe Sawmill is now one of the leading suppliers of softwood products in Yorkshire. And for the future Emma's concentrating on extending the Pickering site.
If there were ever any doubts about a woman running a timber business, Emma Woods has put them to rest. That she's unusual, still crops up on occasions. Just recently someone called up and asked to speak to the owner when she answered the phone – they hadn’t expected a female voice. And when she recently showed a friend around with their daughter, the little girl couldn’t work out what Emma was doing there. Her mother explained, saying 'you can do whatever you want'.
Little girls can grow up and run sawmills as Emma's children know. But, as she says, "My girls don’t see that, they're so used to it." Now that can’t be a bad thing.
Visit Duncombe Sawmill for more information.
Duncombe Sawmill, Sawmill Lane, Helmsley, York YO62 5DQ. Telephone 01439 770234, fax 01439 771466 - Whitby Road, Pickering, YO18 7HH. Telephone: 01751 472777.
By Michele Nevard
