“When we thought through the reality of what that looked like and how strongly we felt about the environment and doing things locally and helping our local supply chains and supporting regional forestry, we knew that we couldn’t accomplish what we felt so strongly in our hearts to be the right thing while also not doing it ourselves.” -Britta Teller, Co-founder and CSO of Steller Floors.
Like many successful businesses, Steller Floors started from an innovative idea. With sustainability at the core, their flooring design would facilitate a circular economy of repair, replacement, and resale. Listen along as we interview co-founder Britta Teller on her journey from college professor to entrepreneur and the lessons she’s learned on the way.
Britta dives into the values that started the company and the methods they’ve employed to keep those values front and center. By shouldering the responsibility to bring their product to market, Steller Floors decided to aim at changing the flooring market forever.
Topics discussed in this interview:
- Transitioning from academia to manufacturing
- Running with an innovation
- Business development support
- Sustainability and wood products
- Choosing the best trees and forests
- Maintaining love for the products as you scale up
- Joining the circular economy with wood flooring
- Enabling repair and replacement of individual planks
- The benefits of a Steller floor
- When starting a business, don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions
- Keeping community in focus
- Rapid-fire questions
Visit the Steller Floors website, or find them on Instagram and YouTube.
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This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique http://podcastboutique.com
Britta Teller:
:Every time you get a chance to support someone making something, support the makers in your community, support the people investing in jobs and growth. You know, for us, forestry jobs, local jobs, they are sustainable jobs. And so I think that there is a lot of growing that we can do by coming together as communities to make stuff that's worth buying and stuff that's worth making.
Todd Miller:
:Welcome to the Construction Disruption podcast, where we uncover the future of building and remodeling. I'm Todd Miller of Isaiah Industries, manufacturer of specialty metal roofing and other building materials. Today, my co-host is Seth Heckaman. Good morning, Mr. Heckaman. How you doing?
Seth Heckaman:
:I'm doing well. It's the afternoon, but it's been a long week. So you're, you've lost just track of it at this point. I understand.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, I was trying to be presumptive and assuming everyone listens to our podcast in the morning, and you just ruined all that. But that's okay.
Seth Heckaman:
:Because that's when we listened to it during our morning workouts. We're so diligent and disciplined.
Todd Miller:
:Exactly. Yes, exactly. I've got three one-liner jokes for you. I don't know if these are called dad jokes exactly. Because they're just one liners, no opportunity for you to participate. I will share them.
Seth Heckaman:
:Yeah. Okay.
Todd Miller:
:I used to play piano by ear. Now I use my hands. Works a lot better that way. Did I ever tell you about the time I worked in a pencil factory? I don't think I ever did tell you about that.
Seth Heckaman:
:No, I don't think so.
Todd Miller:
:You know, one day I got creative. I made a pencil with two erasers. It was pointless. I'm just going to stop it at two.
Seth Heckaman:
:The second one wasn't too bad.
Todd Miller:
:They did get a little better, but it's all downhill from there. So let's, let's go forward.
Seth Heckaman:
:Yes, I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Todd Miller:
:Great. We've got our challenge words. So everyone, both Seth and I and also our guests all have a challenge word that we've been given and challenged to work into the conversation. So audience members, you can be listening to see if you pick up on strange words we use. And at the end of the show we will reveal our success or lack thereof and what our words were. So going forward, today's guest is Britta Teller. Britta is co-founder and chief sustainability officer of Steller Floors, based in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, which is North Central P.A. Steller Floors manufactures one of the most sustainable hardwood floor systems in the world. They source local hardwoods that are milled using wind and solar-driven equipment. And they also do that in a way that reduces wood waste. Additionally, their patented technology, and I think this is fascinating, makes wood floors easy to repair, replace and reuse. As part of her work there, Britta is continually raising the bar for sustainable manufacturing of building materials. She has a Ph.D. in ecology from Penn State and is truly working to disrupt and forever change the world of building materials. Britta, thank you so much for joining us today on Construction Disruption. Looking forward to a good discussion.
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, Thank you so much for having me.
Todd Miller:
:Well, thank you. Well, let's jump right in. So kind of interesting, your career really kind of started in academia, you know, being a professor and so forth. And then you pivoted into manufacturing. I don't think that happens all that often. Maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be co-founder of Steller Floors and what drove you to make that kind of pretty dramatic pivot?
Britta Teller:
:Absolutely, yeah. And I thought I was going to be a professor. In fact, I did it for two years. I just fell in love with the natural world when I was a teenager. And so and I also loved my educators. So everyone who was a teacher to me growing up, I looked up to so fervently. I wanted to be just like them. And then I pursued that, sort of following my role models all the way through a Ph.D. program at Penn State in Ecology. I studied plants here in North America, and I studied how seeds flowed on the wind. I studied invasive plants. It turns out to be mostly math.
Todd Miller:
:Really, that's interesting?
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, it's all calculations and probability and statistics. But I did chase quite a few seeds across fields to get the data. And I, I went through the whole thing. I was on the right career track and everything. And in the meantime I fell for my husband at Penn State in the biology department, and he was apprenticing with his dad in the wood products industry. And one day they just dreamed up what would become our flooring invention. Back in the day, it was kind of hard to 3D print things, but they prototyped it. And my husband and his dad are not, I don't know business people, they're inventors. And we thought for a long time about who else could potentially make this flooring. And you know, we had fantasies about, you know, maybe some big flooring company will want to license it or or maybe we can contract it, you know, to snooze on a beach somewhere. But when we thought through the reality of what that looked like and how strongly we felt about the environment and doing things locally and helping our local supply chains and supporting regional forestry, we knew that we couldn't accomplish what we felt so strongly in our hearts to be the right thing while also not doing it ourselves. We took out what was a $50,000 car loan because we only had one car and we bought a bunch of equipment and started making flooring in a small garage in the town that Evan went to high school in. And since then, we've been growing living wage careers and craftsmanship and manufacturing in our community. I'm sure you guys are, I can see the smiles. You guys know the drive of creating things and making things. And since, you know, the invention itself has so much promise to change the way we think about flooring. That's where I really found my home is helping, sort of disassemble what we think of as flooring. It's not, you know, a sort of trash to be thrown away like it's another chance to make something wonderful and value it.
Seth Heckaman:
:Very neat. Such a cool story of blending those passions for, you know, ecology that's always been with you, to new products and manufacturing. I'm curious what, this sounds very like a pun, I don't mean it to. You said the roots of your passion in in ecology. Is that something that's been with your entire life since playing in the backyard amongst the trees and grass and rhubarb?
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, absolutely. You know, we do have rhubarb plants in our yard, in fact. I used to fish for crawdads when I was a teenager. You know, I love being out in nature. So that was definitely at the root of where all of my passion came from. I think one year I even got a telescope from Old St. Nick It was, you know, my passion for the natural world is very intense, so.
Seth Heckaman:
:Very neat.
Todd Miller:
:How many years ago was it that you developed the flooring system?
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, it's an incredible, funny moment for us. We applied for the patent the weekend of our wedding in 2014, so we were so excited about it that Evan stayed up all night, like Thursday or Friday, and then we got married on Saturday. I was, I don't know if I was angry. I was distracted too. So maybe he got away with it. I was planning flowers and things, but but, you know, we never, we never expected to get the patent. Who gets a patent, right? And when, so I pursued my career in parallel. And realistically, the only reason we applied, at some stage Evan said to me, you know, you're in a Ph.D. program, you're going to be this, you know, hoity toity academic. Like, what degree should I have? And I said to him, That's a terrible idea. We don't need more than one graduate degree in our family. And so it seemed actually cheaper to apply for a patent than to send him to law school. And so I thought, you know, well, we don't have much money. I'm a grad student, let's see how much you can learn from applying for a patent instead of going to law school. And then we got it. I mean, we knew it was original. We knew it was unique what we were doing. But a patent seems so foreign, you know, we're just not business people. And so at that moment we started looking for mentors in our community to help us start building a business no matter what. You know, most people start with a business plan and then get a patent. Not us, we got a patent and we were like, Oh no, now what?
Todd Miller:
:Now what do we do with this? Good stuff though.
Britta Teller:
:So definitely we relied on our SBDC, our small business development center. We relied on our regional county and, you know, local partners to point us in the right direction. And in Pennsylvania, there was this group called Ben Franklin Technology Partners, who actually helped advise us and helped invest in our company when we were really young. So, yeah, small business resources are so fundamental to starting starting a business like we have.
Todd Miller:
:Well, that's pretty fascinating all in of itself, just that bootstrapping and starting up a business and so forth. Great story. As I think about hardwood flooring, I kind of naturally think, gosh, what could be more sustainable? But yet you folks take it steps further in terms of sustainability. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means to you?
Britta Teller:
:Absolutely. You know, as an ecologist, I know a lot about how different forestry practices can contribute to deforestation. So for instance, in the tropics, there's a lot of deforestation activity. Tropical lumber is problematic for reasons like that. A lot of engineered products are actually sourced in Russia from old growth forests and boreal regions. So they're not quite as sustainable. Here in Pennsylvania, we're surrounded with a literally green solution, and these forests need our help. You know, many of the forests in Pennsylvania have been clear cut two or three times in the last hundred years. And what that means is out in the woods here, we have something like, you know, imagine a field full of 30-somethings at Coachella and they just ran out of water bottles. They're all the same age and they're competing for resources. And it's our really our responsibility here in Pennsylvania to manage these forests so that they don't become, you know, sort of overstocked and disease-prone, fire-prone. So actually, when we're using sustainable forest practices here in Pennsylvania, the wood that we're sourcing is actually helping make the forest healthier as opposed to less healthy.
Todd Miller:
:That's really interesting. I think of the forest in Pennsylvania and I think of aerial views and you just see these trees forever and so forth. I don't think of them as ever having been clearcut. And that's interesting that.
Britta Teller:
:That's right.
Todd Miller:
:It's happened a couple times in the last 100 years.
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, these forests have built America and that also contributes to our rich heritage and craftsmanship. So, you know, in the sense that those roots run really deep in our community as well. Cabinet making, door making, trim. You know, there's rich heritage here that we're really excited to help preserve.
Todd Miller:
:Wow. So of the woods that you folks are using, what are the common species that you're using for your flooring?
Britta Teller:
:So, oak and maple are by far the most common. They're more common in our region as well. It used to be that people used cherry a lot, but it's sort of fallen out of favor. It might be coming back soon. And then, you know, we also obviously have walnut and hickory, but those are a little bit more rare and harder to find. Ash is one of those species that we absolutely love but is being decimated by emerald ash borer. It's also becoming really rare, which is a shame. Our American history in baseball bats, ax handles, you know, some really romantic fundamental parts of American history are tied up in ash wood. And so, you know, that's sort of a sad story that hopefully has a long-term happy ending. But for now, ash is becoming really, really rare.
Todd Miller:
:Tell me a little bit about that. And I know this wasn't planned at all, but yeah, the emerald ash borer has decimated the forests here in Ohio as well. And even just a lot of neighborhood trees were ash that had to be taken down. What what is going to be the answer there or is there any?
Britta Teller:
:Well, what you'll find among biologists and ecologists is that a lot of them are collecting seeds and putting them in long-term storage. It is actually really common in nature for there to be pest outbreaks and for them to decimate tree populations. Obviously, in our culture it's really important to preserve things. So we'd rather be able to preserve the ash and the elm in our communities. And so what a lot of biologists are doing is just sort of planning for a better future where emerald ash borer dies back or may, you know, make its way across the continent and then we replant them. But obviously you won't be able to get an ash floor for another hundred years.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, interesting.
Britta Teller:
:So it's not hopeless. It's just a long-term turn around.
Todd Miller:
:Long-term, right.So where does your company stand today in terms of production? I mean, do you have extra capacity and so forth, or what does that look like from, you know, those bootstrapping days in the garage and everything?
Britta Teller:
:We have grown by leaps and bounds and it's so exciting. You know, it's hard sometimes for me to even walk in the shop and remember those days where I was rolling up my sleeves and sanding the boards. But it wasn't actually that long ago, it was five years or something, four years ago that I was sanding boards. But really, the support of a lot of our investors and our business partners has helped us grow to this point. And also what I would say is some real investment on the part of our employees. We have some incredible team members from our community who also want to see these things grow. So, you know, everybody's putting in the elbow grease and the overtime to add value. One of my favorite stories is one of our main leaders on the manufacturing floor, A.J. One time he saw a client come in with really unique grain and he followed it. He watched it through the whole process. And then at the end of the process, he saw that board almost not make it into that order. And he said, uh-uh, that's not going to happen, that's a really unique plank. And so he took it and he put it on top with a note to the homeowner that said, This is my favorite board, find a good home for it. And then the clients actually wrote back and said, Tell A.J. thanks. We did find a special place in our floor for it. And that's that heartwarming story, right that that really makes it feel like we're providing value not just for our supply chain and for our clients, but also for everybody in the community who has become so engaged in what we're doing.
Todd Miller:
:Wow. So thinking about A.J. And that, what do your current distribution channels look like? I mean, how or how are you getting the product to market?
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, so we're absolutely shipping nationwide. We, direct from our facility. You know, we would recommend that for any startup these days because it's so easy to find clients nationwide, you know, on the Internet. So we have shipped floors to Seattle, to Florida, to Texas. And those are really, you know, beyond the reach of most flooring companies of generations past before. And companies used to just distribute sort of to their neighborhood or region or they had to pass it to a distributor who then distributed the product elsewhere. And what we're finding is that our product is easy enough for DIY homeowners to use. And so it really, because it's so accessible and we can ship nationwide, we find ourselves often just shipping directly to the job site.
Todd Miller:
:Wow. Well, you got me thinking because my wife and I have a fairly large room in our house that the flooring needs to be replaced, and we've been trying to figure out what to do.
Britta Teller:
:I love it.
Todd Miller:
:We're going to be talking about this tonight, I assure you. So what are, as the Chief Sustainability Officer there, what are your ultimate goals as they pertain to flooring and the environment and sustainability?
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, you know, we're seeing so much growth of green products and building materials. We were just at Green Build, which was a big conference of green building suppliers in San Francisco in early November. And there's so much growth in that industry, and the Inflation Reduction Act is contributing so much to incentives for green building materials that I'm just so excited to be a part of the industry in these early days and watch the program succeed, if that makes sense. So, you know, our very higher order dreams, you know, our flooring planks are removable and replaceable because they don't use nails or glue. What that means in green building products is that it's circular. So you have the opportunity to take a plank out and even return it to us for refinishing. You could refinish it yourself. We could send you a new one. So those are opportunities where since we're investing so much time and effort craftsmanship in those planks, we would love to see them again, right? We would love to even one day be able to buy your floor back and have you trade in your floor and then redeploy that floor somewhere else. And so being becoming part of the circular economy is part of our really, I think, exciting vision of the future.
Todd Miller:
:Wow. Very different way to think about flooring and I think about even all the non wood floors and, you know, they just end up landfill at some point. I mean, that's literally what happens there. In the case of my house, we actually we're doing some remodeling and they just kept putting new layers of flooring on top of one another. We have like 5 layers that had to be torn up and thrown away.
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, so common.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah. So you know, and I had hardwood floors installed in my home once and immediately the first night after they were installed, we were moving furniture into the room, which involved an upright piano and one of the casters on the piano stuck and just left this huge gouge in my floor. And of course.
Britta Teller:
:Brand new.
Todd Miller:
:Interlocking nailed system, there was there was really no way to repair it. So I'm fascinated by the fact that your system allows you to remove and replace individual boards. Can you kind of give us an overview of the system and how it works?
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, absolutely. So we make our flooring planks out of solid wood, you know, as I mentioned from our region, we're sourcing any kind of solid North American hardwoods. We're molding dry planks into very flat, very high-precision milled boards. We have five fixed lengths. And so what that means is we don't have sort of 12, 14-foot long planks. You know, we have five fixed lengths and we have rigid PVC clips that hold the boards together. So our flooring system is assembled plank to plank instead of plank to subfloor. And what that means is you can use a suction cup to remove a plank right out of the middle of the floor or several planks. You know, some folks like to think about storing things under their floors. You know, extra storage in very small homes can be a at a premium. People like the idea for security if they want to put a safe under the floor. We had one guy who thought about sort of having little gun safes all over his house, and I said, Well, but now you've got to have suction cups all over your house. I don't know if that's really that's gonna work out the way you think it's going to work out. But it certainly is an opportunity to have more storage. And I think that, you know, so when we have those five fixed planks, what it means is, in your case with the gouged floor plank, there's always a replacement plank somewhere else in your room. And so you could take a plank from under your couch or under your carpet and swap it with zero downtime. You know, no new person has to come to your house, no chisel and no real repair costs, you know, until you're ready to refinish the whole thing.
Todd Miller:
:Wow. That that is really fascinating for me. So I'm curious, as your husband and his dad kind of developed this, did they go through a lot of prototypes? You know, they were working for this PVC clip system or did they just lock on it and do it once, and it worked and you got the patent and then you started a business?
Britta Teller:
:I'll tell you, you know, did you ever see crazy old Maurice, in like Beauty and the Beast? Like my father-in-law and my husband are very much that archetype, right? They have like this inventor mentality. And so they they tend to be sort of holistic thinkers that just kind of implement. So we haven't gone through a lot of revisions with this particular invention, but the things that have had to be reinvented is like all of our equipment. Yeah, everything we buy needs to be fixed in some way or changed in some way. And so that has just gotten back to elbow grease and an attention to detail that I'm really lucky that Evan has because that's just not my strong suit for him. I'm much more into communicating, you know, sort of our overall goals and like why his level of precision is really important. You know, if you really want a floor to last 100 years or longer, it's got to be nice in the first place. You know, if I if I made a crappy floor plank and sent it to you and expected you to press it flat and nail into the floor, he'd be pretty mad at me if it wasn't glued down. So, you know, if we want, we may even put our floors on eBay. So, you know, folks buy our floors used. And so that's a really exciting future for what we would consider sort of furniture-grade or heirloom-grade hardwood floors.
Todd Miller:
:Wow. Well, what are some of the comments that you received from property owners about your products?
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, You know, so there, we actually are talking to two different groups of property owners. There's your typical homeowner who loves the idea of being able to move planks around their room or refinish the floor themselves. They manage floods or storm damage like, you know, on an incremental modular basis rather than replacing the whole floor. We even had a client call us and say, It happened, it happened. And we're like, what happened? And they said, We left for vacation and we watered a plant too much. It overflowed and ruined two of the flooring planks. And when we came back, we were able to suction cup up the planks and replace them ourselves. And we're like, That's amazing, yay. So our residential homeowners are definitely sort of benefiting from having a more modular flooring system that's easy enough for them to manage. But our property owners sort of in the multifamily residential side are also thinking about labor issues. They're thinking about things that are easy to address with their their residents. So let's say you have a big set of townhomes, right? And you have one manager who lives at the building or on site, and they're responsible for leaks in plumbing or for any sort of move out changeover between tenants. You know, one of the reasons you wouldn't put a hardwood floor in a high end rental is because you would have 2 to 4 weeks of downtime between tenants in order to repair a floor that a prior tenant ruined. In this case, you know, your building manager can go in and 15 minutes, pull out the planks, charge the tenant's deposit for that, and then replace those planks. And then within hours you have time that a new tenant could be moving in, right? So less downtime for rent, less labor cost. And if you're using the property for commercial purposes, owning the floor because it's not nailed or glued down, it's not considered real estate. So there are tax advantages even to having a floating system that you can accelerate the depreciation on that product. So there's lots of benefits either way, but we're definitely excited for anybody using our floors to be able to have the power in their own hands, right, instead of relying on, you know, more and more people. But we also want to support our local floor refinishers and floor installers. You know, we're not leaving these guys out in the cold here. You know, we don't have local installers. We're always looking for folks who are interested in jumping on board, finding an easier way to install floors, a faster way, or even folks interested in providing services in their community to people who have floors that need to be refinished or need repairs and are unable or unwilling to do it themselves. You know, for instance, storm chasers, if you're in a neighborhood repairing hail damage, you might also have folks who have window leakage. And if you had a few Steller floor planks available, you could fix somebody's floor on the fly. So it's definitely an additional service that somebody can provide that's faster and easier than carrying around all those big sanding, you know, machines that folks have to use in people's homes that can create dust. And there's a lot of liability, you know, in managing someone's hardwood floor. And so we want to make those things easier on people who are providing services to provide value to the whole supply chain.
Todd Miller:
:This is completely aside, but have you, could this potentially be used for a gym floor?
Britta Teller:
:That's a fantastic question, and I wish I was brave enough to say yes.
Todd Miller:
:I hear you, I hear you.
Britta Teller:
:You know, I love everything about gyms. I love athleticism and dancers. Dancers are often asking about our flooring. I also am reluctant to sort of today say that someone's profession or someone's health and safety when they're jumping on our floor, or leaping or falling on our floor. You know, one of the things we don't do is recommend putting our flooring on stairs, because if you fall down the stairs, we don't want you to be laying at the bottom of the stairs in a pile of our flooring. You know.
Todd Miller:
:That's a bad image.
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, we're confident for our floors for heavy foot traffic. We have our floors deployed at restaurants. We're confident in our floors for residential home use, lots of dogs, lots of pets, lots of children. But, you know, today, just due to experience, we're reluctant to recommend our floors in big gyms or big dance facilities.
Todd Miller:
:No, I certainly respect that you want to have the experience first before you start encouraging that, absolutely.
Britta Teller:
:We're a little conservative that way.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, I hear you. I love, you know, just your, as you sat there and talked about, you know, storm repair and restoration and the vision you have for, you know, what this would mean, you know, once it really gains significant market share. Curious, is your mind going places for other potential products that, you know, maybe could utilize some of this technology but be a different type of product as well?
Britta Teller:
:Yes, absolutely. You know, we love our floors. We obviously have a commitment to solid hardwood through and through. It comes from the tree. There are people who, you know, we like to stick to our knitting. You know, we're not going to be the guy who personally launches Astroturf with the Steller assembly system. You know, so we are looking for partners in the industry, especially in flooring, who are interested in, and making flooring out of different materials, you know. And then beyond that, we hope to inspire a whole category of products that's more modular, more usable. You know, I personally am very invested in finding more people interested in making high-quality furniture that's modular and contributes to local economies and sustainable forestry practices. You know, it's really, I believe that a huge part of our sustainable economy as it grows, will become less about, you know. I was actually just talking to a business person about this and they said, you know, consumerism seems the opposite of sustainability. And so when someone does something sustainable, you'd think, you know, like the washing machines that just die after five years, right. So you have to buy a new one, right? Well, and I'm like, but what if you just build something really good and really high quality that someone valued and you just charge a higher price for it? Like, couldn't you make basically the same amount of money by selling fewer less often, but better, more expensive. You know, high value, add to living wage, grow your community. And so those are things that I feel really strongly about, is helping people think more about building long-lived products in the United States and use regional supply chains to do that. And so, you know, I think that that's what sustainability means to me. Versus 10,000 IKEA tables that you, you know, throw away every time you move to a different apartment and stuff. You know, wouldn't it be nice if you had one that was for you, and made for you, and you cared about it. So that's what really excites me.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, that's very exciting. And it reminds me a little bit of our approach to metal roofing as well as far as a lot of the things we talk about. And I love the way that you describe it and put it, though, it's great. Any words of advice, though? So we think a lot of our audience members are younger people maybe newer to the construction industry in some fashion. Any words of advice for younger folks out there who might be looking to have a positive impact on the world through building design, construction, or remodeling?
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, you know, I say this a lot. You know, I have a very long academic career, but you don't need that. You just need a good pair of boxing gloves, right. And a passion to get out there and fight for the right thing. You know, it's not easy. You know, it really isn't. And it's not the easy path to go for a thing you believe in and you feel strongly about. But it doesn't require a whole lot of prior knowledge, you know? So never feel like there's something out there you can't learn or you can't understand. Yeah, you'll have to learn, you'll have to understand things. You'll have to ask the right questions. And sometimes you'll be embarrassed because you don't know. When I started this business, if I had been embarrassed to ask some of the questions like, What is QuickBooks and why would I do a thing like QuickBooks? You know, and I knew that it was basic. I knew that what I was asking was so basic to business, right? Like, you have to do accounting, you have to have an accountant, right? But to say something like, What is the QuickBooks? Make a joke out of it, right? You don't know and it's okay. Everybody starts somewhere. And if I didn't ask those questions, I wouldn't find the mentors we got and that's what helped us grow. So really putting yourself out there and asking those important questions, even if you feel like this must be the dumbest thing anyone's ever asked. Definitely, it's worth it. And even if it doesn't end up in a successful business, you'll grow and you'll learn and you'll have contributed to to changing everyone you ask the question of, right? Maybe they'll be inspired to go ask the next dumb question.
Seth Heckaman:
:Very neat. I'm curious, thinking about young people and their integration to our businesses, reading a lot about millennials and what they value in their career and outlook on the world and so forth, and hear often that, you know, it's not just this monetary driver or what they choose to spend their careers, it's this missional component. And so that they also want to have in conjunction. And curious as you've now set out, building a manufacturing business and don't know a single manufacturer is blessed with a surplus of people. Curious if that sustainability mission being such a fabric of your business has, do you feel like that has helped with your recruitment and team member engagement, especially with those on the younger end of the spectrum?
Britta Teller:
:Sustainability? No. However, our, so sustainability in terms of like, let's say, lowering carbon emissions, not relevant to our our employees. Like they may think about it once in a while when they hear me go on about our carbon footprint, please recycle. Yeah, blah, blah, blah, Britta. But I think it's clear when we're investing in living wages, when we're investing in people's careers, that we make it evident as part of our philosophy that when rich lawyers retire to Maine and they buy a floor, a kid in Tyrone goes to camp, right. There's no broken parts of that. You know, we we don't drive a Lexus. You know, we don't we don't have, you know, enormous cars, like we also are evidently invested in and growing this business. And so that is a sustainable community, right. And when we started the business and we thought about what we wanted to see grow, was it our pocketbooks? Was it our investment portfolio? And we had a, my son was born two and a half years ago. And in the midst of it, you know, we keep thinking even someone asked, you know, okay, well, you're investing in living wages today, but what when you're a big company down the road and you're this big giant, what about then? And I'm like, I don't know, man. Today's the hardest day to pay you the living wage, right? Today is when I'm strapped, right? This is when it is hardest for me to pay a living wage. If I become a big corporation, you better believe I'm gonna think it's easy. So that permeates everything about our culture. You know, to the point where, you know, our employees care enough about the craft and about the natural material that we have folks coming over to me this week and even holding two planks up side by side and say, can you tell the difference between the two? I'm like, No, I can't. And they're like, This one's crap. And then they leave. And so, you know, you know, noticing things that like, I don't even still notice, you know, it's a value add that when I look at my son and I think, Would I rather him grow up with money or with a community? I would ten out of ten always choose I'd want him to grow up in a community that's a healthy community. And you can't buy a healthy community. You have to grow one. You can buy a lonely island, but you can't buy a community. And so that's where we're putting our investments.
Seth Heckaman:
:Beautiful. Thank you. Such great leadership lessons there of, yeah, building a culture where everyone feels like they're in the same boat, you know, and a valuable part of it rather than you all just using the rest of them to row your way to wherever you want to be so.
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, exactly.
Seth Heckaman:
:Awesome.
Britta Teller:
:Even though some days I fantasize about it right? You know, if only I had a yacht.
Todd Miller:
:Oh, this has been great. Well, thank you very much. We're close to wrapping up what we call the business end of things. But is there anything we haven't covered that you would like to share with our audience here yet?
Britta Teller:
:No. I think, you know, just every time you get a chance to support someone making something, support the makers in your community, support the people investing in jobs and growth. You know, let's link arms and build, you know, local jobs are green jobs. We can all agree, you know, low carbon footprint that crosses the aisle. You know, for us, forestry jobs, local jobs, they are sustainable jobs. And so I think that there's a lot of growing that we can do by coming together as communities to make stuff that's worth buying and stuff that's worth making.
Todd Miller:
:Well, that's good stuff. And I know that, you know, I hear that a lot from our team members too that in manufacturing, and they are just so captivated and driven by that idea of making something local that, you know, may end up wherever. But yeah, that idea of making something very cool. Well, before we close out, I am obligated to ask you if you'd like to participate in something we call our rapid-fire questions. So these are seven questions, Britta. They may be a little serious, maybe a little more silly. All you got to do is provide a quick answer. And of course, our audience understands you have no idea what we're going to ask you if you agree to this. So what is it? Are you up to the challenge of rapid-fire?
Britta Teller:
:I'm in, i'm in.
Todd Miller:
:Awesome. Well, Seth and I will alternate asking the questions. I will be the gentleman and let Seth go first.
Seth Heckaman:
:Alright, Well, thank you very much. First, rapid-fire question. If someone asked the first grade Britta what she wanted to do when she grew up, what would her answer have been?
Britta Teller:
:I absolutely know this answer because my mom cut out a newspaper article from our local neighborhood newspaper where I won a coloring contest, and I said I wanted to be a farmer.
Todd Miller:
:Isn't that cool, though? Look where you've ended up.
Britta Teller:
:That's what I keep saying.
Todd Miller:
:Obviously a connection.
Britta Teller:
:Look at this! I made it.
Todd Miller:
:That is awesome. Question number two, What is your bucket list vacation?
Britta Teller:
:Oh, you know, I would love to take my husband to Hawaii. I've been. But he is, and I'm not a beach person, but he is a beach person. And so I know it's nothing but suffering for me. But I know he'll love it.
Seth Heckaman:
:You're talking to two very big fans of Hawaii, so. Yes, we understand.
Britta Teller:
:So you're like, definitely do it.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Seth Heckaman:
:Alright, next question. What is a movie you have seen that really made you laugh?
Britta Teller:
:Incredibles Two. You know I'm telling the truth.
Seth Heckaman:
:That's a great one. That is a compromise movie in our house where one of the movies, Daddy's okay watching on Disney Plus. We'll go to it for a family night. Yeah, get it.
Todd Miller:
:I'm coming to love this question. So who would you want on your team if you were in a zombie apocalypse?
Britta Teller:
:This is tough because my husband's whole family is extremely utility focused. It's my mother in law, absolutely. She is 73, 74 and she just went just a couple of months ago on a like ten-day rafting trip down.
Todd Miller:
:Wow.
Britta Teller:
:Down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. So, yeah, like, you guys ain't got nothing on my team. It's my mother in law. And she also has to care about my survival because she loves my son the most. So, you know, she'll care about me, too.
Todd Miller:
:That is an awesome, we've asked that question three times now, and I've just got I love hearing people's responses. Very, very cool. Good stuff.
Seth Heckaman:
:Awesome. If you could go back and spend a day with anyone in history, who would it be?
Britta Teller:
:Oof! It all depends on my mindset, right? We've been talking so much about Nikola Tesla around here as an inventor. I actually have a thing for poets. Is that weird? Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, there's a bunch of sort of mid-century poets that are sort of like wartime poets that I really connect with, and I've never figured out why. So it's a mystery. Like would I like this person? I like how they say things. So it's mostly like I could end up there and be like, Oh, these guys are terrible. So I'm not sure. Like, do you go back in time to, like, meet someone you're sure you like or somebody who like, could be a tossup like Walt Disney, right? Probably a jerk, right? What are you gonna do?
Seth Heckaman:
:Probably, yeah. I get it.
Todd Miller:
:Good, good answer. Okay, I think we're up to our next to last question. If you had to choose between being a dog or a cat, which would you choose to be?
Britta Teller:
:This is a tough one. We have both, and me and the cat are at odds right now, so I have to pick the dog. My cat absolutely loves my husband more and she gives me this dirty look every time she sees me. And I'm like, alright, well. And I've had cats that love me, but this one does not. And so I pick dog.
Todd Miller:
:You might win that cat over. It was funny, my wife and I have a dog right now that we joke when we got her, I was her person. I mean, I was the one she wanted to be with. And now it's the complete opposite. She wants to be with Lisa every moment. So, things change. Who knows why?
Seth Heckaman:
:Alright, last question. Do you prefer working from home or the office?
Britta Teller:
:100% the office. I am a social creature. I absolutely love water cooler talk. And so for me, it's always really hard to like. I love the infinite ability to, like, connect with folks like you guys or the Internet. But it's very easy for me to feel isolated at home.
Todd Miller:
:Hear you there. Well, this has been very good. Oh, I will let everyone know we were all successful on our challenge words. Seth, you had the word?
Seth Heckaman:
:Rhubarb.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, you worked it in well, I had the word aerial and Britta, you had two words actually.
Britta Teller:
:St. Nick. Yep.
Todd Miller:
:So, I don't know if the audience heard those and wondered about them, but we worked them all in, and so that's cool. So, Britta, if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Britta Teller:
:Yeah, we have a website, floorsbysteller.com and on Instagram and YouTube you can find us at Steller Floors. It's S-T-E-L-L-E-R because my last name's Teller and my husband's last name is Stover and we mashed them together as a joke and then it stuck. And so we're Steller Floors, misspelled and everything. S-T-E-L-L-E-R, so floorsbysteller.com.
Todd Miller:
:Awesome. Very good. Well, this has been fantastic. I've really enjoyed this. It's been a pleasure and a lot of fun.
Britta Teller:
:I appreciate it, guys. It's so much fun to talk with folks who were all sort of focused on similar industry developments and disruptions.
Britta Teller:
:Todd Miller: That's true. That's true. Well, thank you, too, to our audience for tuning into this episode of Construction Disruption with Britta Teller of Steller Floors. Please watch for future episodes of our podcast. We are always blessed with great guests. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or YouTube. Until the next episode, though, change the world for someone. Make them smile, encourage them. Powerful, simple things you can do to change the world. In the meanwhile, God bless, take care. This is Isaiah Industries signing off until the next episode of Construction Disruption.