VRLDA Golf Tournament and Annual Meeting 

When you grow up pulling logs out of the woods via horsepower (we’re not talking engine specs here, we’re talking actual horses), it’s not necessarily a surprise to end up making a career in the lumber industry.

“My dad was in forestry, so I was always around trees and lumber growing up,” Paul explains. “My brother would cut down the trees, and I would haul them out, first with a horse and then later a tractor.”

Still, despite having the proverbial sawdust in his blood, Paul’s route to owning a lumber business was not a straight shot; there was a fork in the road.

Before entrepreneurship, came mechanical engineering. Paul earned an associate’s degree at Vermont Technical College before pursuing a bachelor’s at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and eventually a master’s at the University of Colorado.

“For me, college was just about learning, not necessarily developing a career,” he says. “When I got out of college in the summer of 1989, we were in a recession, and there were not a lot of engineering jobs around. I think it was just bad timing.”

Or perhaps it was good timing, in a way, given how things turned out. Paul and his father had always talked about one day starting a business together.

“I was doing some carpentry over the summer. Then winter came, and that’s when I said, ‘Dad, now’s the time,” Paul recalls. “He handed me a trailer load of cedar shavings and said, ‘Here, sell these. You come to a fork in the road, and you’ve got to make the right decision.”

Paul started Koenig Cedar in 1990, driving around in his pick-up and selling cedar shavings to pet stores. Before long, he had the idea to design and manufacture dog collars that capitalized on cedar’s natural flea-repelling properties.

As successful as the dog collars were, there was still a better opportunity. “People kept calling us for lumber, so we just kind of followed where the money was,” Paul says.

It’s quickly coming up on 35 years since Paul arrived at that fork in the road, and the continued success of Koenig Cedar is proof that he chose the right direction.

“What I like about the business is that I can wear many hats. If I want to run the forklift, I can go out in the yard and do it. If I want to do a delivery or make a sale, I can. I don’t have to just do one particular job all the time,” he says. “I also like the idea of being self-employed. I don’t like working for other people.”

He does like working with other people in the industry, though, as evidenced by his long service with the VRLDA. Over the years, he’s served as a board member, vice president, president, ex-officio president, and two separate stints as treasurer, the office he currently holds.

“I was kind of thinking they don’t need me anymore, and then they asked me to be treasurer again,” he laughs.

Paul and his wife Elaine have lived in Starksboro since 1995, where they raised three children, none of whom followed their father into the lumber industry. His two oldest sons both went into different types of engineering, and his youngest is a chef.

Asked what keeps him going in the industry after all these years, Paul responds simply, “I’m good at it. My wife asks when I’m going to retire, but I don’t really have that word in my vocabulary. It’s a good career, and people are always building something, so lumber is going to be around forever.”