This Woodworking Company Hit $500K/Year By Leveraging A Hyperlocal Social Network

Andrew Stokes - Cameron Vilcsak

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Published: January 31st, 2023

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Andrew Stokes - Cameron Vilcsak

Founder, MTN SIDE BUILDERS

$40K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

MTN SIDE BUILDERS

mtnside.ca

from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

started April 2018

$40,001

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Andrew recommends to grow your business!

Outliers: The Story of Success Malcolm Gladwell

Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds David Goggins

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Want more updates on MTN SIDE BUILDERS? Check out these stories:

1. Reaching $40K In Revenue And 5M YouTube Views Despite The Pandemic (2020) ➜

2. How I Gamed The YouTube Algorithm and Went Viral With 25M Views (2019) ➜

3. How I Grew My Youtube Channel To 6M Views (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for MTN SIDE BUILDERS. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 5 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hi there, we are Mountain Side Builders. A group of professional and personable problem solvers working in Vancouver, BC. We specialize in off-grid jobs in the wellness retreat industry.

We generate around $500k in revenue annually, which is a large leap from the $40k Cameron was originally generating through YouTube and chainsaw carving during the first interview with Starter Story.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

Since we last talked, Cameron Vilcsak (originally Mountain Fire Woodworks) partnered with Andrew Stokes (originally Stokes and Co.) to incorporate and grow past the self-employment milestone. We hired our first employees and now have a solid team of four, with others coming in and out during specific jobs where they are needed.

We have accepted some of our biggest clients through 2022, with the biggest being a 5-star fly-in, fly-out wilderness retreat in the pacific northwest. This allowed us to upgrade our tooling, and take time away from tools to grow our business platform.

Our biggest funnel of new clients is word of mouth, with the second being a platform called NextDoor. It is essentially a hyper-local social media platform.

Most of our crew live in a relatively HCOL single-family residential neighborhood, so there is essentially endless work to do on people’s houses and yards. From full renovations, decks, and fences, to fine furniture and the odd commercial job.

Through NextDoor and a contractor search engine called BARK!, we can keep our crew busy and our clients extremely happy. We do not compete on price as we offer a premium service with a very big emphasis on hiring professional and enjoyable people.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

Given our very strict hiring criteria and the level of craftsmanship we uphold, it is difficult to scale our team as quickly as we would ideally like.

A more day-to-day issue is opening up time for the founders to quote new jobs, meet new clients and deal with the endless pile of admin tasks that come with running a service business.

We also recently hired a new accountant that has been a great fit for our team and our struggles with keeping jobs and materials separated properly.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

This year we are focusing on systematizing all of our processes to save ourselves some future headaches during the growth of the following years.

We are hoping to move into a new light industrial building that will serve as a headquarters for our crew. There will be storage, woodworking equipment, some office space, and hopefully some yard space as well. As space comes at a very high premium in Vancouver, we need to be tactful in what will be of the most benefit to us.

With the space, a larger team, and less focus on the administrative side in the next 5 years we hope to take on larger and larger projects. The jobs that seem to excite our crew the most are the more artistic and finer detail-oriented jobs. Which will hopefully get us out of the mud and rain a bit more!

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

Once a year, Cameron reads the book Can’t hurt me by David Goggins. Which although is not meant for everybody, it helps him get through the inevitable winter lull.

Andrew just finished reading the Golden Spruce, which is very fitting because the story follows the area and places we have been working through the last year.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

Yes! We are always looking to hire professional woodworkers and craftspeople. We would love to hire someone who would be capable of running a small crew and seeing a job through from A-Z.