Siblings Jim Robbins, Alden Robbins, and Catherine Robbins-Halsted are the fifth generation of their family to run Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, Maine. The Robbins kids grew up around the sawmill, have worked various jobs there, and took ownership from their father and uncle in 2013. Since then, they’ve continued to grow the business together.
What is the background of this family business?
Jim: The company started in 1881 as water-powered sawmill on the Saint George River. And we’ve grown to what we are today. We have the sawmill. We have dry kilns and a planer mill. We ship all over the United States, as well as to the Maritime region, and do a little export overseas. We also have a power plant, where we produce renewable energy and steam for our dry kilns to help us dry lumber. It provides us with a chip market for our low-grade pulp as well, which is a much needed shot in the arm for this area’s economy, for both the loggers and landowners. We also sell byproducts, such as shavings to horse farms and sawdust to dairy farms, as well as to the local pellet manufacturer. And we have a mill down in southern Maine, in East Baldwin, which we acquired last year. We employ about 200 people now. We do a variety of things in order to keep going.
We also have 28,000 acres of timber land in Maine, and in 1996 we put a conservation easement on 23,000 acres of that land, in Township 40, which includes Nicatous Lake and West Lake, to protect that land as working forest. We’re very excited about that. It’s been good for us and the state of Maine as well. Eastern white pine is our bread and butter. We also manage for other species – spruce, oak, hardwoods – really whatever is best for the soils to grow. Our target is shelterwood management for eastern white pine.
What is it like to work with your siblings?
Jim: It’s not easy at times, but we have pretty good understanding that work is work, and when we step outside of work and go back to our families, then we’re outside of work. We’ve always been a close family, and we try to keep that bond. We all live around the mill, within a mile. We have very close ties to the land and the mill and to this area and our employees – a lot of them live in Searsmont too.
Catherine: I think the business is big enough that we’re each able to have our own individual areas that we can operate in. But at the bottom of it, we have a respect for each other. Even if we disagree, we’re not disagreeable while doing so. We go on vacations together, and our kids all get along well, and our spouses. I realize that it is kind of unique, but we grew up close, and we’ve just managed to make it work.
Alden: All the projects we do, we do as a family. Jimmy provides some financial oversite. I’m sort of looking at what can we do next. Catherine is a great mediator and provides some common sense. We’re all different, but we all work together toward the same goal. My brother and I shared a bedroom for a lot of years growing up – we had to get along! Our mother and father provided a supportive and stable household, working through differences, traveling together, working in the garden together, eating together at a family table. Here we are 40 years later, and we’re all still together. I think that’s where it started.
Are there any 6th generation Robbins who are interested in working for the family business?
Alden: Jim has five children. I have six children. Catherine has two children. My 5-year-old just designed a water-powered mill that he wants me to build. So he’s going back to roots. I’ve got a 17-year-old working his first day today in the planer mill. He’s expressed greater interest in pursuing a career here this past year. We did not push any of our kids to come back. They see the hours that are needed to dedicate to a family business – the weekends when the turbine trips off and you’ve got to drop what you’re doing and come back and help out, or a truck shows up late at night and you need to go help load or unload or get paperwork. Because we’re all within a mile of the mill, it’s never not a part of your life.
Catherine: We welcome any of our kids who want to come back, but I also think it’s critical that they go and work someplace else. My son has worked two summers in our planer mill and is in his second summer in the sawmill. He’s a junior in college – a business major, forestry minor. But I told him that after he graduates, he has to go work someplace else before he comes back here. I think it’s important to go someplace where nobody knows him and see what it’s like to work for other people and see other work environments.
Jim: I’ve got a son that’s interested in possibly coming back. He’s doing a graduate program at the University of Maine at Orono. I have a daughter downstairs working the front desk today.
Have you always been involved in the business?
Catherine: I went to school in New Hampshire, and then lived in the Boston area for about four years. I’d always worked here growing up, but I chose a different career path. When I was in college, I realized that someday I’d like to go back to the family business. But I wanted to go and do other things first. After I’d been gone for a few years, an opening came up here, and that’s when I came back.
Jim: I worked here every summer. When I graduated from the University of Maine, there was a position here for a log scaler. I had my scaling license, so I came back and started scaling logs for the mill, then worked my way into the sawmill a couple of years after that. Then we had a position open running our yard and dry kiln, so I did that for about 10 years.
Alden: I worked here growing up and then went to college, and I enjoyed upper level business classes. I went out west to pursue a graduate degree and planned to stay out there. Then I got a call saying, I need you home. I was planning on ending up here, but came back faster than I expected. I started into the fray and never looked back.
What are your roles in the business?
Catherine: I do accounts receivable, human resources, insurances, applying for grants. I also do a lot of board work outside of the business. I’m on the boards of Land for Maine’s Future, Forest Society of Maine, Maine Forest Products Council, as well as our local school board. And I’ve recently joined the board of a company that’s gone into one of the old paper mills up in Madison. It’s called TimberHP by GO Lab. They’re making a wood-based product that absolutely replaces, at a negative carbon footprint, poly insulation.
Alden: My technical role is vice president, but I oversee sales. I’m also on some industry-specific association boards: North American Wholesale Lumber Association, Northeastern Lumber Manufacturers Association, Retail Lumber Dealers Association of Maine. I also like to look at big picture projects, futuristic projects – vertically integrating the company. We started up a wholesale distribution branch in Atlantic, Canada, about 10 years ago, did a sawmill acquisition last year, a large heat and power biomass power plant facility back in 2018. So, looking at the future and pursuing different projects, different technologies – that’s part of what I like to do.
Jim: I’m the president. I do a lot of day-to-day operations, meet with the supervisors out on the plant, and I’m pretty heavily involved in the Georges River Energy power plant as well. I serve on the Farm Credit East board of directors.
Did you spend lots of time at the mill when you were growing up?
Jim: We spent a lot of time after school and on the weekends down here. We learned to operate equipment at young ages. We also started sticking lumber at young ages on the edge sorter beside the mill. If they were short on help, we would come down. We used to have a Christmas tree farm, so we spent lots of time harvesting Christmas trees and baling Christmas trees. We spent a lot of summers shearing Christmas trees as well.
Alden: That was a big time summer job for us. We sheared a lot of Christmas trees, mowed a lot of Christmas trees, fertilized a lot of Christmas trees. It’s very hot. You get stung a lot. I think there’s definitely some lessons to learn in starting at the end of a very long row and just working and working and working. And you finally get to the end of it, and you have to turn around and sharpen your blade and start on another one. It keeps you humble.
How has the business changed since you’ve been involved?
Jim: Sawmills have been a very traditional business, without a lot of change. But that’s something we’ve brought to this business – quite a bit of change. We’ve changed how we sell our products and how we manufacture our products. We make a coated product now; a contractor can install it and a homeowner doesn’t have to deal with it. We’ve really focused on what our customers at retail yards want, and try to develop products based on their needs.
Catherine: One thing that our father and uncle always believed in and instilled in us was reinvesting into the business and we’ve continued to invest in the business, and on a bigger scale – looking at bigger products. They always believed that we might not be the biggest, but we want to produce the best quality product, so you always had to be forward looking.
Alden: Our father and uncle made some large investments that were ahead of their time, including that conservation easement. Once we took over managing the business and started to get on our feet and feel comfortable, we started looking at going further down the distribution chain, adding a distribution facility in Nova Scotia, adding additional production with the mill in East Baldwin, adding to the technology at the coatings facility, the biomass plant – setting the table so we don’t have to worry about where our residuals are going for the next 20 years. We’re just continuing the tradition that was instilled in us.
What have been some of the keys to ongoing success for Robbins Lumber?
Jim: We really rely on key people. We have some really great employees and great managers. We can’t run this mill by ourselves. It’s our employees that really step up and make the difference.
Catherine: Both Dad and our uncle sit on our executive committee. We have a great relationship with them. It’s nice to have that institutional knowledge that we can still tap into. We have great respect for what they did. They did a heck of a lot, and it shows. We appreciate that and respect that.
Alden: I think that was one of the keys with the acquisition last year of the Limington Lumber in East Baldwin. That mill had a very similar family-owned philosophy. We’re a flat organization – I will take sales calls throughout the day, Jimmy’s in the sawmill checking on how things are running, Catherine is managing receivables. We are all open door people. That mill in East Baldwin has a great crew with the same philosophy – hardworking, very proud of what they do, producing a quality product.
What are some of the challenges lumber mills are facing now?
Catherine: It’s hard to find labor. The price of fuel makes it difficult for our employees. It makes it more expensive to run our trucks. It makes it more expensive for our loggers to bring us logs.
Jim: My largest concern is loggers. We produce a world-class product. We service our customers better than anyone else. But getting the raw material to the mills – the loggers have had it so tough the last decades, with the closures of the paper mills, the low-grade market going away, and now with the added fuel costs. And with the boom that Covid brought to the residential market, there were a lot of easier things to do to make a buck than being out in the woods. That was part of the consideration when constructing such a large biomass facility – trying to provide a low grade market for the local industry. But we’re not a paper mill. I think so many people underestimate the economic engine that a paper mill is. The scale of a paper mill and the fact that we lost a multitude of them in the past decade has such a massive effect, that we’re all reeling from that still.
Alden: There’s been a push to look for investment in the low-grade side of the basket. I think in the next couple of years you will see a lot of investment in biofuel, chemical compounds of residuals, cellulose, nano-cellulose, potential uses for replacing some of the fossil fuel inputs. There’s a lot of investment and a lot of tire-kicking and a lot of looking. I think biorefineries are coming next. I think we’ll see some of that, but we’ve got a long way to go.
What was it about this work that made you decide this is what you wanted to do?
Jim: I think it’s the lifestyle that we grew up in. It’s hard work, but it’s also rewarding that we live in such a beautiful part of the state. We work with good people. And it’s been in our heritage.
Alden: Part of it is that there are a lot of people that depend on this mill. I don’t know what we’d do if this place wasn’t running. To some people it’s noise and trucks. But for us it’s the smell of industry. It’s jobs. You get the pitch on your hands. The sawdust is flying. The steam’s coming out of the dry kilns in the mornings. There’s a lot to love. You are so intimately involved with the product that you’re working with. They talk about sawdust in your blood – when you get the pitch on your hands and you get the shavings flying in the air and you smell it, it’s here, it’s real, it’s tactile.
Discussion *