September 2025

For me, growing up in the U.S. South, fall always meant football. Whether it was Friday Night Lights, the Tide rollin’ on Saturday, or NFL Sunday Ticket, September was synonymous with football. Over the years, the game of football has taught me a lot of life lessons—how to win with grace, but most importantly how to lose with grace. How to help my 11-year-old understand that work, hard work, is what drives true success, not anything else. But isn’t that why we watch sports? Because on any given Sunday (or Saturday) anyone can win; anyone can out work whatever obstacle that stands in their way. And that winning becomes addictive. The taste of success is too sweet not to crave.

As I’ve written before, I graduated from the University of Alabama before I joined the Timber Processing staff, and was fortunate enough to overlap with the greatest college football coach of all time, Nick Saban, for a few years, before his retirement. Coach Saban, regardless of if you loved him or hated him while he stalked up and down the sidelines, the lessons he drilled into his players and that he now shares with others through speaking engagements are of mental toughness, perseverance and grit. The three keys to success on the football field, sure, but they are also the three keys to success in life. It’s not hard to make the leap that they are the three keys to success in a sawmill either.

Coach Saban has been quoted saying, “When people have success, one of two things happen. They either get really satisfied and want to keep thinking about it and talking about what they did, or the success becomes a little addictive, and it makes them want to keep having more.”

I believe success in a sawmill isn’t just about the management group, or the machines, it is about operator buy-in. The management group is your Coach Saban, the players your operators. When people want to come to work because they are winning day in and day out, the whole culture shifts. It did at Alabama— going from losing to the University of Louisiana Monroe at home in 2007 to winning the BCS National Championship in 2009. That’s one helluva swing. We’ve all seen it happen in sawmills, too. Be it a safety incident, new machinery installation or focus on lean manufacturing, but when that swing happens everyone wins, and the coach has truly done their job.

I can’t pretend to know what goes on in the mind of Coach Saban. But I feel confident in saying his retirement in part, showed the world that his work was done, at least at Alabama. He changed the culture to that of demanding hard work, seeing success and making everyone connected to the program addicted to that success.

His retirement story is not unlike any of the other great leaders in our industry. As the aging leadership base moves into retirement, having completed what they set out to do: Whether it be a new state-of-the-art mill, a culture shift to focusing on safety, or a set of acquisitions, their collective legacies are that of addiction to success. You only have to look through recent issues of this magazine to see leadership change announcements from Sierra-Pacific, Boise Cascade, Georgia-Pacific, Hampton Lumber, Westvaco, Collins, and the list goes on. All of these companies share the addiction to success Coach Saban references, moving with confidence and valuing true hard work.

As with Alabama football, there’s a new era in our industry coming. I expect to see more retirement announcements coming from mill companies, giving the young guns the chance to step up, take the wheel and find even more success. After all, at any given time, anyone can win with hard work.