With 42 years of logging history under his belt—a longevity that is quite unusual in today’s forest industry—Les Zeller, owner of Alberta’s Zell Industries, has seen a lot and more importantly from his perspective, learned a lot. When asked about the secret to his success, one answer stands out.

It starts with one simple question he asks himself daily before he heads off to work.

“What will you do today to improve yourself? You have to be forward thinking, looking at better ways to tackle an issue and think of ways to be more efficient. You can’t just look at today and think that what you are doing today is going to work tomorrow,” he says.

“So you have to work on yourself personally, like how to read, understand and interpret financial information, manage people, weigh risks and negotiate. Because if you don’t, at some point, you are going to hit a roadblock and you will fail.”

Zeller, who grew up on a farm near Wildwood, Alberta, which he believes has contributed significantly to his work ethic, began hand-falling when he was 18-years-old and incorporated his business in 1984.

Alberta logging veteran Les Zeller wakes up every morning asking himself what he can do today to improve himself personally and build an even better and more prosperous logging company that has 42 years of history.

Since then, he has grown from five line skidders working with hand fallers to full mechanical harvesting of about 700,000 cubic metres annually.

Zell Industries logs for Vanderwell Contractors (1971) Ltd to supply their sawmill near Slave Lake, with wood harvested from the Slave Lake and Athabasca areas. They also log for West Fraser Timber, generally on steep slope, some extreme, in the Rocky Mountain foothills south of Edson, supplying both the West Fraser Edson and Hinton sawmills. They are a stump-to-dump contractor, owning five of their own trucks and sub-contracting the remainder out.

That constant drive for self improvement is what Zeller believes fundamentally divides the contractors who prosper from those that struggle. It takes the ability to admit what you don’t know and to seek out answers. Secondly, it is important not to be afraid to think outside the box to solve challenges, as long as the numbers make sense. Zeller is both a deep thinker and a numbers guy.

For example, rather than operating his skidders in the typical manner of both delivering and stacking their drags at roadside, they only deliver their drags. From that point, a Tigercat 880 loader stacks them while the skidder has already made the turn, heading back to the block to grapple another load. The result is significantly higher production from his skidders or alternatively, a reduction in the number of skidders needed for the job, while decreasing wear and tear on them. And because the loader basically only has one job in this application, Zeller can afford to buy and repair an older model unit, plus the log stacks are neater, and have less breakage.

His employees also work in teams, with the ability to participate in a bonus system.

Zeller, putting his coaching skills to work, knows exactly how much production each team should achieve in delivered wood to roadside per shift. If they exceed that number, they earn a bonus.

All told, they have up to 90 employees during the peak winter season. The southern operation works 10 months a year and the Slave Lake operation is seasonal from September/October to the end of March. Taking on a longer contract with West Fraser in 2011 was a pivotal moment for the company, as it really helped them to retain their core workers and maintain cash flow.

Zell Industries employees work from two very well equipped camps. One benefit of operating camps located some distance from town is that Zeller can hire staff from anywhere in Canada, and he does.

Tired of being shut down because of wet weather in summer, Zeller implemented a dual wheel system for the back axles of his John Deere 748 skidders and front and back axles of his John Deere 948 skidders, which the engineers said would never work on his Deere 748H models because, they said, it would blow his differentials on a regular basis. Seven years later, they work even better than he expected with a bit of tweaking, such as modifying the tire rims. He achieves better flotation and traction and keeps working in summer when most other contractors would be parked. They also install 36” pads when needed on their feller bunchers for better flotation.

With the alternative being having to shut logging down with a camp full of workers, these investments in equipment modifications have been well worth it.

“Also, with the duals, when we went into steep ground, we were amazed how much steeper ground we could operate on,” says Zeller. “We’ve worked up to 55 per cent slope with the duals and have had very few issues.”

And he has a strong belief in the need to make Alberta’s forests more fire resilient, starting with more commercial thinning. To that end, Zell Industries has answered the call from their client, Vanderwell Contractors, and have invested in a new Ponsse Scorpion harvester working with the 2015 model of their Komatsu 895 forwarder to commercially thin some of their extensive spruce plantations on private land located in north central Alberta. They have now achieved merchantability with harvested logs in the range of 6” to 16” in diameter. Zeller’s son, Mitch, supervises this endeavor.

With experienced operators in high demand, Zell Industries can tap into the entire Canadian job market as they operate two well-equipped live-in camps for their workers. As a stump-to-dump contractor, Zell Industries controls its own destiny on when logs are delivered as they own five log trucks and sub-contract a number of others out.

Other family members involved in the business are Zeller’s wife, Roberta, who is the company office manager and his brother-in-law, Al Lachance, who helps with logistics.

Zeller adds that there are many other long term, loyal employees who are paramount to the company’s success.

So Zell Industries has experience working in a variety of logging environments, including spending literally years salvaging burnt timber which requires significantly more equipment maintenance.

“Anytime you are in contact with charcoal, it is abrasive and therefore there is more aggressive wear,” says Zeller. “For example, tire chains on skidders wear faster. The processor operators probably have the hardest job. They really have to watch for charcoal and spiral crack and cut any of that out.”

That’s because pulp mills can’t have any charcoal in their chips.

During his journey, Zeller has learned how to plan, budget and evaluate risk in terms of tree size and terrain which he expects to encounter at least two years in advance when making decisions related to equipment purchases, as well as to prepare for contract negotiations. With today’s escalating costs for new and used equipment as well as parts, he is finding that advance planning harder and harder to do.

“A skidder used to cost approximately $300,000 back in 2016/2017 and now it is $500,000,” he says. “I don’t know how you can justify that cost and how you can make that up. Hopefully they are more productive, but I don’t know where this is going.”

Essentially, it has forced him to hold on to his equipment longer or tap the second-hand market more often. Given his experience, he knows what equipment in his fleet is worth repairing and what equipment needs to be changed out more often and bought new. Typically, he leans toward buying new feller bunchers because used units with low hours are very difficult to find. And he’s open to sharing his approach with other loggers who ask. It is not unusual to find a unit in his fleet with 20,000 hours on it.

His logging fleet consists of a healthy mix of primarily John Deere and Tigercat equipment.

“We tend not to get too heavy with new equipment, even though it is very tempting,” says Zeller. “We do buy new equipment but we also keep a fair bit of used equipment. To make that work, we always have spare equipment to level out our production. We don’t have the peaks and valleys in our production that way, although we try not to get too old in the hours and try to have a good mix “

He adds that based on his experience, the used equipment helps to pay for the new equipment, and the spare equipment eliminates the peaks and valleys.

One of the biggest investments that Zell Industries has made recently is a Ponsse Scorpion harvester which they use in their commercial thinning work for Vanderwell Contractors in Slave Lake, Alberta.

“When we have breakdowns, we don’t have to make rash decisions and pay through the nose for repairs because we have that spare equipment, which allows us the time to figure out the cheapest and best way to repair the equipment and get it back into production,” Zeller says. “We tend to keep our equipment longer than most other loggers—but if you are going to keep your equipment for a long time, you have to be set up to repair it and keep it in good shape as economically as possible.”

Their fleet consists of 10 feller bunchers. Their newest ones are Tigercat 870 feller bunchers and John Deere 953 feller bunchers. There are 13 model 748 and 948 John Deere skidders and one six-wheel drive Tigercat 635 skidder. Their 10 processors consist of model 2154, 2454 and 903 MH John Deere carriers as well as three 850 and 855 Tigercat carriers. The processing heads are a mix of model 622 and 623 Waratah heads. They also have two delimbers to process tree length wood. The smaller heads are used in their southern operations where 95 per cent of the logs are softwood, with most of the bigger units working further north, primarily driven by the occurrence of about 40 per cent aspen hardwoods in those cutblocks. Their log loaders are primarily John Deere 2454, 2656 and 3156 units with one Tigercat 880 machine.

The northern operation uses butt-n-top grapples as a portion of the wood is tree length. The southern operation units use power clams because it is all cut-to-length logging. The loader attachments are a mix of Brandt and CWS brand products.

As stated earlier, Zeller is a numbers guy, now spending about 80 per cent of his time in the office, although he says he really enjoys his time in the field. Though he is now pushing 65-years-old, Zeller still feels he has plenty of reasons to get excited about work every day because from his perspective, there is still plenty to learn.