OXFORD – Joseph Woodbury’s entrepreneurial ways found a willing home in Maine following his exhaustive search for a company that needed his turnaround expertise.
“It took me two and a half years to find something I thought was a good fit,” the new owner of National Wood Products of Maine Inc. said Tuesday.
The Oxford company was listed with a business broker and would have closed if a buyer had not emerged. Woodbury, a native of New Jersey, closed his purchase last August.
The 39-year-old West Point graduate used much of his own capital to buy the company for a price that exceeded $1.1 million. Western Maine Finance, which provides loan capital for start-up businesses, gave $50,000 toward the purchase. The Growth Council of Oxford Hills helped Woodbury navigate the state’s many business programs and find employees.
“We really appreciate his interest in western Maine and especially his interest in the wood products industry,” said Barb Olson, the Growth Council’s vice president.
Now, the machines hum at the 46,000-square-foot manufacturing plant on Route 26. The 29 full-time and 10 seasonal employees make wooden children’s furniture, skateboards, flooring, cutlery handles and other products. Woodbury expects the company to post sales of $2.5 million this year.
He sees growth on the horizon in the company’s markets and in its employment base. “Employment could double in the next three to five years,” he said. “I think it’s possible.”
Woodbury, who lives in Woodstock, is no stranger to companies’ metamorphosis. After a tenure in the Army, he presided over the start-up of a paper processing company in Virginia and engineered turnarounds of two struggling companies, a postage stamp manufacturer in Connecticut and a package concrete plant in New Jersey.
But his years at West Point made him yearn to return to New England. “I always had a longing to come back,” he said.
The company uses maple, cherry, oak and birch for its products, as well as some exotic woods. It serves the largest skateboard seller on the East Coast and also makes children’s furniture during the fall for L.L. Bean.
Woodbury hopes to expand his seasonal business with the Freeport-based retailer by filling orders for wooden products offered during spring and summer. He also is pursuing lucrative orders for the company’s end-grain wood flooring, particularly flooring for large commercial buildings.
The company boasts a favorable turnaround time for orders, being able to fill many of them from inventory in 48 hours. Woodbury said such attentiveness to customers combined with quality products should give his company an edge in what he called a “brutal” environment marked by foreign competition.
“We have to find and serve niches that don’t lend themselves to foreign competition,” he said.
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