{"podcast":{"title":"The Woodpreneur Podcast","slug":"the-woodpreneur-podcast-1118875","podcast_index_feed_id":1118875,"rss_url":"https://feed.podbean.com/stevekex/feed.xml","website_url":"https://stevekex.podbean.com","image_url":"https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/22451032/the-woodpreneur-podcast-1.jpg","author":"Acres of Timber","episode_count":100,"summary":"We cover the business and marketing side of the woodworking, sawmill, tree service, furniture making, Urban Wood, and woodworking industry. If you're a woodworker, sawmill owner, or any other entrepreneur and/or business owner in the wood industry, you need to check out this podcast. Each week, we interview business owners, large-scale companies, entrepreneurs, makers, and designers while also offering marketing and business advice that will help you grow your business and increase your profits. Tune in every week! www.builldergrowth.io www.woodpreneurlife.com Join our free and private Facebook Group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/woodpreneurlife","last_synced_at":"2026-07-24T06:18:02.705416+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-woodpreneur-podcast-1118875"},"episode":{"title":"Ben Deumling, Zena Forest Products","slug":"ben-deumling-zena-forest-products","published_at":"2026-04-30T14:40:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-woodpreneur-podcast-1118875/ben-deumling-zena-forest-products","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-woodpreneur-podcast-1118875","url":"https://stevekex.podbean.com/e/ben-deumling-zena-forest-products/","audio_url":"https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/gd3mlapd3wdp8nd2/49c705fa-48d2-4df7-bd6e-f4b23b11c655_fe23ae1e-4f47-4d03-b24e-a9c5e37fe0e1.mp3","summary":"The next time you walk through Portland International Airport, look down. The floor beneath your feet is a piece of Oregon history, and Ben Deumling of Zena Forest Products helped put it there. In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, Jennifer Alger sits down with Ben to trace the remarkable story behind Zena Forest Products, a family-rooted Oregon business that has spent 25 years figuring out what to do with the hardwoods everyone else overlooked. Growing up managing a diverse, mixed-species forest in the Willamette Valley, Ben inherited a problem: Oregon had virtually no infrastructure for milling anything other than Douglas fir. So he built one. What started as a mission to use more of their own forest has grown into a vertically integrated operation milling Oregon White Oak, Big Leaf Maple, Oregon Ash, and more, taking wood all the way from the tree to a finished, installation-ready floor. Ben breaks down the unique challenges of working with Oregon White Oak, one of the densest hardwoods in North America, from writing his own drying schedules after university research fell short to building homemade kilns out of repurposed refrigerated shipping containers. The centerpiece of the conversation is the PDX Airport project, and the origin story of Zena EdgeGrain, an edge grain tile product that Ben brought to North America for the first time, inspired by a wood floor he tracked down in Copenhagen. The airport needed 75,000 square feet of flooring. Ben had a seven-person team, a brand new product, and a decade-long relationship with the architecture firm that made the introduction. He shares what it really took to land and deliver a project of that scale, including the sleepless nights, the production strain, and the rebuilding that followed. Ben also gets into the i…","meta_description":"The next time you walk through Portland International Airport, look down. The floor beneath your feet is a piece of Oregon history, and Ben Deumling of Ze…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3074,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-woodpreneur-podcast-1118875/episodes/ben-deumling-zena-forest-products/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-woodpreneur-podcast-1118875/ben-deumling-zena-forest-products.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}