Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Chris Tatge. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Chris, appreciate you joining us today. So, let’s start with trends – what are some of the largest or more impactful trends you are seeing in the industry?
Chris, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m a framing carpenter by trade. A framer builds the structural framework of houses and buildings. Their main tasks are building walls, floors and roofs. After high school, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was offered a job as a framing carpenter and I fell in love with the work. I was good at it. Framing gave me the confidence I never had in school. By the time I was 20 I had my own small company and a contract to build 26 houses. Today I own Dynamic Construction & DC Materials. We are the lead framing contractors in South Central Wisconsin. We have our own lumber yard, supply labor and material packages for large apartment buildings. Because we control the material and labor we can get involved in a project very early on, share ideas with the architect and general contractor about how to design to optimize the framing process. We use a panelized walls system- All of our walls are designed and built offsite, because when we control the offsite design and the flow of material, we can better control the onsite schedule. The buildings we frame range in size from 50,000 to 300,000 square feet. We guarantee our schedule to our customers; one week to put up all the walls, and one week to build the floor, no matter how big the building is. That means we can build a four story building in just eight weeks. We are proud to have streamlined the process, while delivering efficiency and quality at every turn!
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
We got into lumber in 2019, a move that would have been a major catalyst for our growth. At the wholesale level lumber is sold by the board foot. In 2019 the normal price for one thousand board feet of lumber was $350. Over the course of a normal year that price would vary by about $30, so there was some, but not major price risk. In 2020 the price of lumber went through the roof peaking at $1700! Lumber was scarce and when you could find it, it was expensive. We had a few jobs with obligations to supply wood at one third of the price I could buy it for. After the initial run up I relied on my vendors (who had much more experience than I did) for advice on forward pricing material, good buying opportunities, and how to communicate well with my customers in a volatile market. 2020 very easily could have been the end of DC Materials and our new lumber business. Instead we used an uncertain time to learn, advise our customers and grow trust.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I thought I had reached the peak of my success as a carpenter. I was 35 years old, swinging a hammer, wearing a toolbelt everyday, I had 20 employees, building one project at a time. I thought that was as good as it gets for a tradesman like me. In 2014 I got involved with a trade association, the National Framers Council. I met framers from outside of Wisconsin. Framers who were very successful business men. They had hundreds of employees managing multiple projects. I learned as much as I could from them and after a while made my big push. In 2023 we were named one of the fastest growing companies in America, making it onto the prestigious Inc. 5000 list. The learning lesson was to look beyond my market scope at the time, and to ultimately visualize a different type of success, and really embrace the idea of what could be possible if I went for it. I had to unlearn the drive to stay in my lane.
Contact Info:
- Website: dcmaterialsllc.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-tatge-38007a72/
- Twitter: @framerchris