By David MacDonald B rad, please tell the Spotlight on Business readers a little about yourself, your years of experience in log construction and how Montana Log Homes came to be. BN: I started in log construction kind of on a fluke. I was going to college to be an electrical engineer and I came home to do an apprenticeship after my first year. I realized pretty quickly that an electrical engineer’s job is not at all what I thought it was and I was in need of money. My current business partner Jim Bathstalker had just started a company called Pioneer Log Cabins with another guy. (Jim had actually rented a home from my parents years before, so we knew each other since I was 14 or so.) So I ran into him and started doing logs with them. They were very much a start-up company at that time. I went back to college for a little bit, worked off-and- on when I was in town and then their business started to get busy. That’s when I really realized that electrical engineering was not my dream field. I dropped out of college and started doing logs full-time. Pretty soon I was driving logs and then I was running the company. It moved really fast. In 1981 I started with them and in 1985 Jim, my partner and I, partnered up and the two of us have continued ever since. Do you know what motivated Jim to start Pioneer Log Cabins, Brad?
BN : Jim actually started the business because of a need for a home and a lack of money. He read the book Dove and in that book the main character or storyteller builds himself a log cabin and describes how he does it. Jim did a little more research and he built his own cabin. From there, a neighbour saw what he did and said, ‘If you build me one, I’ll pay you.’ It kind of snowballed from there. By the time I started with the company, they had built at least six homes. The quality of what they were building then compared to what we are putting out now is substantially different. Things were pretty creative, let’s say, in those days. As I came on and particularly by the time he and I partnered up we had the system down pretty good and we were rolling into bigger projects in the mid and late 80s. “Jim did a little more research and he built his own cabin. From there, a neighbour saw what he did and said, ‘If you build me one, I’ll pay you.’ It kind of snowballed from there.” Is it the style of home that has changed to your advan- tage or is it the hand tools you use? Why do these “bigger projects” keep coming your way from all over North America?
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • APRIL 2018
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