I know you have customers that buy 5 or more cord at a time. I have one that gets 3 cord spread out from Thanksgiving till February, the rest only get 1 cord a year. Down here we had tree work scheduled 6 weeks out, year round. We would only miss a few days a year to weather. Dad used to guarantee his men a half day pay if we didn't work, so he would keep enough Oak around the lot to stick them on the wood pile waiting for the weather to break. If they split for an hour or so and weather didn't show any sign of breaking, he'd let them go and pay the half day. If they didn't want to split wood, they could go home, no hard feelings, but no half day pay. The only wood he brought back to the lot was Oak, everything else he would wholesale to a Farmers Market. All the wood that did get split by the guys on rain days, he gave to me to sell, and I split the rest on my time, so there was no real money in it compared to the Tree Service work. When he retired in 86, he was averaging $85 per man hour on 3 and 4 man crews. I forget what he made on the spray rigs with 2 man crews, it may have been a little less per man hour, but the profit margin was higher due to less money in the equipment. Down here there are big firewood processing operations that I'm sure make a lot of money, but they are not one man, one saw operations, definitely not scroungers. People always ask me why I didn't take over the family business when my Dad retired. I think he made about $800,000 his last year. He had guys that drove trucks get DWI's on the weekend, and not show up for work on Monday, leaving a crew stranded, a customer waiting. He had one of our best climbers shoot himself, thank goodness at home, not on the job. He wasn't able to take real vacations till he was about 50-55, then I never got vacations because I had to run things while he was gone. When he retired I went to UPS. My last year I made just shy of $100,000, had 8 weeks paid time off, didn't have to worry about how other peoples actions would affect my life and such. It's all a trade off. But, anyway, that's why so many of the guys on the forum here get Tree Services to dump their wood free. It's a necessary evil, and down here you can only keep so much "debris" on a lot before the State or County gets on you. So, just get rid of it.
I guess it's location, location, location. We had 5 acres about 30 miles outside of Washington DC, surrounded buy bigger farms, so zoning wasn't as bad on us as companies based in town, but we paid more in fuel, to be based so far out. A typical day, I'd make a run home at lunch with a load of chips. Get back after the guys finished lunch, load up the wood, drop the chipper and make a run to the Farmers Market. They paid us $50 for a dump load of wood, 12' bed with 6' sides, they got whatever was on the truck. I had an old Hough Payloader with a 2 yard bucket on it. Once a week or so I'd push the chip piles up and just let them rot. Dad mixed the rotted chips in his garden and let neighbors take all they wanted. He had zero money invested in processing/handling wood once it was off the truck. The old "Huffer" was big enough I could push a weeks worth of chips around in a few minutes. It all boiled down to "why pay several men to make a few hundred dollars, when you could pay the same men, the same amount, to make a few thousand dollars.
That's the main reason I had to let the company go. Dad could depend on me, but I couldn't find one knucklehead to depend on. We had a couple of the best climbers in the area, but they were not businessmen. If they made enough money for the day they were happy, they didn't think about down days, where the money came from that Dad used to guarantee their half day, etc. When I was young I had a volatile temper, I could be easy going and get along great, till people started doing really stupid stuff, then I'd blow. We had one dumb arse pick up a chunk of steel, just about the size of a brick, in a big scoop shovel, and throw it through our almost new Asplundh 16" drum chipper. Busted the drum. Dang drum cost several thousand dollars. The guy was a good worker, we had a strict policy of "NO" rakings in the chipper. But, no matter how many times you told them, some one would be scooping up gravel and trash throwing it through the chipper. I found it was just easier for me to be a good employee for someone else, than to find good employees for me.
The problem with Tree work was ground help was pretty reliable, and worked hard. Good climbers were few and far between, and they knew it. If you said boo to them they would quit, and the next day they would be hired on with another big company. Everybody knew the top men and would be trying to hire them away from you. They would offer them $5 bucks an hour more and keep them through the good months then lay them off during the winter, then they would be back begging for their old job. We had been in business in the area for 4 generations, so we had enough clientele to stay busy during the bad months. Dad climbed into his 70's and by the late 70's early 80's I was climbing. So, if we had a no show, one of us had to take his place, which put running estimates behind. It provided a good living, put me through private school and college. But there were a lot of family sacrifices to be made. Climbing gets in your blood. I always missed climbing, but never missed the 24/7 of owning the business. I still climbed on the side till I had my knee replaced 2 years ago at age 60.
This right here^^^^
i wood think that your buyer is in a bind. i wonder if he raised any prices at his campground since last year. if he has been a longtime regular customer then i think he should know what you have delivered in the past and tell him that. plus nobody wants a unhappy camper.
