We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jonathan Claasen a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jonathan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

For me, starting a business was a bit like being on a trapeez — there was quite a bit of hanging on for dear life!

Jonsteen started as two beer drinking buddies stuffing trees into tubes for one solid customer [Muir Woods National Monument] who bought our packaged coast redwoods and giant sequoias to re-sell to park visitors. We had no working capital, so we only had whatever meager profit we could generate to put into growth. It was a constant financial stretch, and not a stable way to live. I had a whole other business (PR Consulting/Graphic Design/Writing) and made money as a gigging musician also to support my growing family as Jonsteen developed alongside. My cohort, Craig “Steen” Christensen, was attending science and forestry classes at Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt).

It was a high wire act with no safety net. We were young and crazy and that really helped. Concerns about the financial “safety” of what we were doing were diminished in the face of the great hope we had for the success of our vision. But no matter how “committed” or convinced we were that our idea for a new kind of tree company would be successful, doubts inevitably crept in. Yes, when you can’t pay the bills and the future is completely uncertain and there is no demand for your product (because no one knows about it), it’s hard not to question your sanity.

The security of a “regular job” was an alluring, undiscovered country.

But despite the financial turbulence, uncertainties, and questioning, enough good things were happening (like having a picture of one of our trees being presented to the Gorbechevs on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle) that our faith in the potential of what we were doing was bulwarked. And we persisted.

It took us decades to become financially stable and those were messy, humbling, even desperate, times.

Nevertheless, the entrepreneurial life is the life for me.

It’s a life of creativity and self-reliance and constant learning. When things work out, it’s absolute magic.

Jonathan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Fresh off a degree in creative writing from Pepperdine, I rented an office in Eureka, and hung out my shingle first as a “Wordsmith.”

I did the work that found me. I consulted about public relations and wrote and designed ad campaigns, created brochures, edited the writing of others, and put out countless media releases for a diversity of clients, from hospitals to political campaigns. Eventually, I found “my people,” and developed an expertise in marketing luxury inns, fine dining establishments, wineries, and jewelry.

I grew up literally in the redwood forest. My childhood home in Arcata, CA abuts the city’s Redwood Park and the first “municipal forest” in America. I existed in these woods my entire youth.

When the opportunity presented itself to work with trees, it was a natural fit. I was anxious to find a way to make money which was not tied to billing hours to clients. Having trees to sell fit the bill.

Trees seemed so much more significant and important than luxe goods and fine wine. And they were much more fun for me to write about. I applied all the tools I had employed as a Wordsmith to this new “product.” My mission was to make trees an “object of desire” by using good writing, good art, and innovative packaging.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Our trees and grow kits are our best ambassadors.

This is a pattern that has repeated pretty often over the years: a major buyer calls — she had purchased a grow kit of ours at a national park and it worked to germinate a giant sequoia and she just couldn’t get over the magic of her experience. Plus, “I still have the canister on my desk because I just love the artwork!” Boom! She wants to explore bringing our products into her stores.

Yes, a lot of cool people go through America’s parks and some of them have day jobs as buyers for major retailers! So, the one-two punch is that, first, our items present themselves very well through good design and clever writing, and, second, a lot of people see them because they are in high-traffic locations.

Finally, who doesn’t love trees?! And growing the most massive living thing on planet earth or the tallest or oldest tree in the world? What fun!

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Early on, we did obtain a small SBA loan from a local bank, collateralized by my residence in Arcata. Eventually, we bought a piece of property from family friends who were kind enough to carry paper. It was more land than we needed or could afford, but we hung on for dear life and managed to keep up with our payments by sacrificing payments to vendors, no doubt. At this time, California real estate was appreciating like crazy and this was also the time of sub-prime lending and stated income applications. We took full advantage of these looser lending standards and refinanced the property repeatedly, pulling out equity almost as quickly as it grew in order to funnel money into the business. These serial refinancing “bail-outs” were our means of capitalizing and scaling Jonsteen.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sequoiatrees.com [retail]. www.jonsteen.com [wholesale]
• Instagram: @jonsteentrees
• Facebook: jonsteentrees
• Linkedin: jonsteen-trees
• Twitter: @jonsteentrees
• Youtube: jonsteentrees
• Yelp: jonsteentrees
• Other: Thank you guys!

Image Credits
Jonsteen Company, Inc.