TJ'S LOG & TIMBER

General Manager Bailey, Colorado

• On site at the mill and the shop
• Full time
• Reports to the owners The job in one sentence You run

TJ's:

the mill, the shop, the crew, the calendar, and the cash, and you answer to the owners for all of it. Who we are TJ's Log & Timber has built handcrafted log homes from Bailey, Colorado, since 1980. We are the only vertically integrated mill and shop in the Rocky Mountains. Our loggers harvest Colorado lodgepole pine and Engelmann spruce, we dry and mill the logs ourselves, and our timbersmiths cut and fit every wall in the shop before it reaches the customer's site. We build the home once in Bailey, label each log, then take it down, load it in reverse, and stack it on the customer's foundation in days. We have built homes from 800 to 13,000 square feet. Our best work is in the 800 to 2,400 range: a cabin, a guest house, a dwelling for a parent who wants to stay on the land the family built a life on. We also build log railings and other accents that end up all over the Mountain West, from your neighbors' backyard to the Denver Zoo. There are seven of us, plus a rail installation contractor and a part-time hand on marketing. A production manager who leads design, the log count, and the build. A build supervisor. A mill crew. One person at the front desk who answers every call. We are owned by a small group of investors who are patient about most things and not patient about the truth. Why this role exists The general manager seat has been held on an interim basis since November 2024. An operating partner stepped in for a few months as a favor while another transaction closed. Twenty-one months later he is still in the chair. He built most of the systems the company now runs on, and he will tell you plainly what he could not build: after two years he still lacks depth in timber, milling, and log-home construction. That is not the education this company needs to buy again. TJ's needs an operator who knows wood, means to stay, and will run this company for the next decade rather than the next quarter. The shop can build anything a family asks for. The mill is capable. The order book is real. What the company has never had in the two years since the ownership change is one person who owns the whole thing: the floor, the number, the calendar, and the log pile, all in the same head. What you would actually do Five jobs. They do not take turns. Run the floor. Safety, flow, and a shop that is clean and ready on a Monday morning. The crew is the pride of this place, and several of them have been cutting log longer than you will have been here. You are not going to be the best timbersmith in the building and nobody expects you to be. You are the person who makes sure the work in front of them is sequenced, supplied, and worth doing, and that the standard holds when you are not looking. Own the number.

We price two ways:

the linear feet of log in a structure, and the days our crew needs to build and stack it. Every quote runs through a model that says what a day in this shop has to earn. Your job is to protect that number when a family pushes, when a general contractor pushes, and when your own wish to win the job pushes hardest of all. You will also find where the model is wrong, because it is wrong in places, and you will fix it rather than work around it. Hold the calendar. Kits and stacks have names and dates on them, and a date we miss costs a family a season. You run the production timeline, the hand-offs with outside general contractors on both sides of our work, and the draw schedule. Every earned draw is invoiced the day it is earned. Collections are yours. Payroll lands every other Friday and it lands because you made it land. Feed the mill. Standing log inventory, procurement, dry time, and the condition of the yard. This is the part of the business that has run through one person's phone for two years without a system behind it. Building that system, so the shop is never waiting on material and we are never buying at the worst moment, is a first-year job and probably the highest-return work you will do. Report the truth. We run a weekly leadership meeting off a thirteen-line scorecard that reads from HubSpot, QuickBooks, and Airtable. The owners read it.

You will present the week:

cash, collections, leads, estimates, contracts, exceptions, and what is slipping. There is a monthly call with the owners. They would rather hear a bad number on Wednesday than a good story in November. What this job is not It is not a Denver job with a truck payment. This seat lives at 62160 US Highway 285. The mill is here, the crew is here, and the walk-ins are here. It is not the sales job. We are hiring a Sales and Project Coordinator to sit with families, write the project brief, and carry a project through permit and contract. You own conversion as a number on the scorecard, you coach the person doing it, and you take the calls that only a general manager can take. You do not run the site visits. It is not a design or engineering job. Our production manager leads design and the log layout, and a Colorado-licensed engineer stamps the structure. You coordinate them and you understand their work well enough to explain it to a family and to argue with a plan reviewer. It is not a blank sheet. HubSpot for every deal, Airtable for the build tracker, QuickBooks for cash, a pricing model in Google Sheets, and a weekly scorecard are all running today. Keep them honest and make them better. Do not start over because the tools are not the ones you used at your last company. It is not a seat with unlimited capital behind it. Money is available for work that pays its way back, and you will be asked to show the arithmetic before it moves. Who this is for Somebody who has run a shop, a mill, a plant, or a construction yard, and carried the number for it. A real operating floor matters more to us than a log-home brand on a résumé. Somebody who knows the whole life of a build: design, budget, permitting, inspections, certificate of occupancy, punch list. If you have run a construction project that way, a log is a different material and not a different discipline. Somebody who can tell us where last month's cash went without calling the bookkeeper. You do not need to be an accountant. You do need to read a profit and loss statement, a balance sheet, and an aging report, and to know which of the three is lying to you. Somebody the crew will follow. Our crew includes men who have rebuilt their lives from a hard start, and they can tell within a day whether a person in a clean shirt respects their work. If you have to perform that respect, they will know. If you show them naturally, they will teach you everything. Somebody who raises the standard without making people small. We would rather lose a habit than a person. Somebody who tells the owners a bad number on the day it is a bad number, and who would rather tell a family the truth about a date than miss it quietly. Somebody who wants to live up here. Platte Canyon in February is part of the offer, not a footnote to it. We will teach you logs. We cannot teach you to lead a crew. Why this role may not be for you If you need a tidy company. The pipeline is messy, some deals in the system are two years stale, and the website is wrong in places. You will clean up while you run. If you want authority without arithmetic. You will have real decision rights here, and every one of them will be defended with numbers in a room with the owners. If you need a bigger staff before you will commit. There are seven of us. On a stack week you will be in the yard with your hands on a log, and on the same day you will be on the phone with a plan reviewer. If you would rather be liked than trusted. Some of this job is telling people who wrote checks what the checks actually bought. If you need a finished playbook. The process is written down, and the shop is still a shop. If mud, sawdust, and a 7,700-foot winter bother you. What you get from us A company where you can see your work standing. Drive up Highway 285 and there is a home your crew built, with a family in it. Owners who will tell you the truth and expect it back. In the second conversation you will get a full look at the financial condition of this company: the statements, the obligations, the pipeline, and the plan. You will make your decision with the same information we have. A real handoff. The interim general manager is not tossing you the keys and driving off. There is a defined transition, with the systems, the owner relationships, the customers, and the open projects walked through one at a time. Decisions pushed to the person closest to the work, including you. We will hand you more responsibility than you are ready for and be there when you fall, so that you do not fall far. Rest is part of the work. Mill weeks and stack weeks take a lot out of a person. We will tell you to pull back when you have pushed too hard. Compensation Compensation and benefits are negotiable and will match the person's experience. There is a real possibility of earning equity in this company, and that is a conversation we would rather have with someone who has already seen the numbers. This is a full-time, on-site role. Why we exist A log home from TJ's starts as a standing tree in a Colorado forest. It passes through the hands of a logger, a sawyer, a timbersmith, and a crew that stacks it, and it ends as a place where a family gathers for fifty years. Every hand along the way belongs to someone who lives in these mountains and can point to the house and say, I built that. We think that chain is worth protecting. Work confers dignity on the person doing it, and a company that keeps skilled people employed in a mountain town, building something beautiful from what grows here, is doing more than selling houses. That is why we care how a crew member is treated on a job site, why we push decisions down to the person closest to the work, and why we are looking for the person who will carry all of it. How to apply Skip the cover letter and hold the résumé. We will ask for it if we move forward. Instead, record a two-minute voice memo or video on your phone and send it to bbrustkern@tjslogandtimber.com. Tell us about a shop, a yard, or a project you ran: how many people, what number you carried, and the hardest call you had to make. There is no right answer. We want the specifics. If we move forward, you will spend a day in Bailey, in the mill and the shop, with the crew and without us hovering. Then you will sit down with the owners and the books. Come with boots and with your questions for us.

Pay:

From $120,000.00 per year

Benefits:

Dental insurance Health insurance Vision insurance

Work Location:

In person