Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to John Brady. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

John, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

I am much happier being a business owner than I ever was as an employee. My wife and I started DevlinLee Designs when we were 25. We both had full-time jobs, I was a paramedic so my schedule offered me about 4 days off a week. I spent those four days building furniture. In our first year, we only offered three products built to order. The potential to go self-employed full-time was evident in our first year but we needed more sales. In our second year, we grew our product list by taking on custom orders. A customer would submit a picture or sketch of the furniture piece and we would build it, If we liked the piece we would take pictures and list it. By the end of the second year, I was making more money self employed than I was at my full-time job.

When the time finally came that I did leave my job, it wasn’t a hard decision. I had worked for the same company for 6 years, and towards the end, the culture wasn’t a fit for me anymore. My last month being employed was difficult though, I was working a lot, so our orders were backing up. On my first day being fully self employed I had week-old orders with no material to build them. After I caught back up to my orders, the real hard work started. I wanted to grow our business into well a bigger business. I didn’t want just to be self-employed, making a job for myself was easy but I wanted to be bigger than just myself. But how? Looking back, there is no one thing we did to grow our business. Online marketplaces are where we started but now we have local customers and clients that allow us to expand into construction and remodels. It has taken a lot of self-education and big-picture thinking to get here. The whole process of starting and growing our company has changed us and we are much happier being business owners.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

DevlinLee Designs started out making pallet wood furniture on the floor of a garage. I would pick pallets up from places in town, tear the boards off, cut and sand the wood, and then construct the furniture with a hammer and nails. The whole process was done 100% by hand and the end product was 100% real wood, recycled, and would last! Since then we’ve grown our furniture catalog to accompany different hardwood and design styles.

The wood we use is still repurposed but in a whole different way. Before we use pallets, now we use the trees that are cut down from around town. So often trees removed from residential or metro areas are taken to the dump or have the good intention of becoming firewood but then rot away. The trees being removed are often very old and have an exquisite character in their grains. With the help of a local sawmill, we divert some trees from wasting away to nothing. Most recently we built an entire kitchen out of a gorgeous maple tree that had to be removed from the front yard. The tree was easily over 100 years old and now can showcase and serve the house for another 100 years.

Today we offer furniture fabrication, custom-designed furniture, antique furniture repair, home decor, custom cabinetry, kitchen cabinetry, interior remodeling, and architectural woodwork.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

In 2017 my wife and I bought our dream house in a small town in Georgia. DevlinLee Designs was only producing furniture at the time so moving the business was as easy. We enjoyed the new adventure, living far from home, and fixing up the gorgeous old plantation house. DevlinLee designs had another record year. Ironically we were shipping a lot of furniture back to Ohio. We were using a local mill to source lumber but we had 13 ac. that was pretty much all wooded, so we bought a mill and started cutting our own lumber. On Dec.19, 2019, my wife and I woke up in the middle of the night to a beeping sound. The sound was low like the beep of a security alarm, but it was muffled like I was listening underwater. I left the bed to go check on the noise. When I opened the bedroom door smoke started coming through the wall. Our house was built on an old pine plantation so all the walls and ceiling were tongue and grove boards. As looked out the doorway I could see a faint glow and the ceiling was dark. It was the smoke alarm going off! I left the room and headed to the fire extinguisher. When I turned the corner into the living room, the living room, and kitchen were ablaze. Windows started to break, and once that first window broke it was like the sound came back and the fire roared. I ran back to the bedroom, my wife and I grabbed our two dogs and went out a window. In a matter of minutes, everything we had was gone.

DevlinLee Designs was closed for a year. We moved back home to Ohio to start rebuilding. Anyone with a business knows that momentum takes time to start. When we shut down DevlinLee Designs for that year we lost any sort of following or momentum we had. The business was very slow for the first year of reopening, I thought about going back to work but I didn’t keep my paramedic license. The thought of going back to a job after being my own boss, well it wasn’t making me happy but I was prepared to.

I caught a break when my in-laws decided to remodel their house. I of course helped will all the carpentry but I was pretty excited about building kitchen cabinets. The finished kitchen is double to size of the original and has painted grey cabinets, a quartz countertop, a giant slab of maple for an island, shiplap ceiling, I could go on about every aspect but I won’t. I’ll say I am proud of the work I did. I did the best I could at taking a few pictures, and I posted them on Social Media. Just like that, we started taking kitchen remodeling projects.

I always had the vision for DevlinLee Designs home renovations, but didn’t know how to get there. I mean who wants to hire someone to do a renovation if they’ve never done one before.

To that end I learned a few things; Being self-employed is one setback from being unemployed. When our house fire happened I didn’t have business insurance, or any way of renting a shop, not to mention hiring someone to work because there were so many other aspects I had to focus on and DevlinLee Designs suffered. So Growing bigger than just a one-man self-employed wood shop, was a major focus. We also learned, even if you don’t know how you will reach your business goal, it is important to have them and keep vigilant on looking towards them. Your goals and dreams will happen, you will get where you are going and it feels great when you can put a checkmark next to them. Now on to the next goal!

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

We are proud to say that we manufacture/produce all of our own products including furniture, cabinetry and organizers, wooden slabs, and more. We do have the ability to mill our own lumber but we mostly use a local mill that specializes in custom lumber milling.

When we first started we only had three items to sell; a square coffee table, side tables, and an entryway or hallway table. We grew our product list by using customer requests. We don’t purchase build plans. We take a picture, sketch, or idea and basically start designing it in reverse. If the design and the finished product are a good fit for us then we market it and add it to our production list. Not every design has been kept but our customers have had some great Ideas.

Our kitchen cabinets are very different than any other cabinets you’ve seen. We build all our own cabinet boxes, drawers, organizers, and cabinet faces. Building everything in-house takes a little more time but the quality of materials and craftsmanship is second to none! Designing a kitchen this way allows us to customize cabinet sizes to fit a space.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.devlinleedesigns.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/devlinleedesigns
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Devlinleedesigns
• Other: https://www.houzz.com/pro/devlinlee-designs https://www.tiktok.com/@devlinleedesign

Image Credits
all image credits DevlinLee Designs