Q&A: Kalesnikoff’s Andrew Stiffman talks mass timber

Kalesnikoff Mass Timber just opened a new 100,000-square-foot prefabrication and modular facility in Castlegar, B.C., expanding its vertically integrated mass timber operations—the first of its kind in North America. A fourth-generation, family-owned company founded in 1939, Kalesnikoff now produces a range of engineered wood products, including CLT and GLT panels, and supplies mass timber and prefabricated components to Western Canada, the U.S. Pacific Northwest, Japan, and Europe. The new facility enhances the company’s capacity to offer full modular construction solutions.

SiteNews caught up with Kalesnikoff Mass Timber’s Vice President of Construction, Andrew Stiffman, to talk about the significance of this new capacity, the future of Canadian mass timber and some of his favourite projects ever.

SiteNews:Tell me a bit about Kalishnikov’s decision to build this new facility. It’s the first of its kind in North America. What the reasoning behind going for this project?

Stiffman: I think you got to understand the history of the company to answer that. It started as a sawmill operation which expanded into mass timber which is what I think most people know us as today, a mass timber manufacturer,  as we make glulam beams and CLT panels. We really focus on supporting the project needs in the construction market. I’d say 98% of our revenue is construction project based. So we’re basically serving as a specialty subcontractor. We’re not just selling products to people. It involves all the support services to take that material and turn it into something useful for the building. And in doing that we’ve that noticed so many gaps in the execution. So you have a fully pre-fabricated structure with a mass timber kit that we send to the site. Then the GC doesn’t have a way to get it dried in quickly, for instance, because they’re building the envelope the old fashioned way and it gets rained on and stained and you have a whole other host of issues. It takes forever and you lose all the schedule momentum that you’ve generated through a quicker erecting structure and a more fabricated structure. So we really saw the need and the opportunity to further the amount and level of pre-fabrication that we’re offering the end customer with pre-fabricated walls and with full volumetric modular. So that’s the market need that we’re trying to meet with the new expansion.

SiteNews: I understand the building itself is a showcase of mass timber and prefabrication. Tell me a bit about the design and the construction process.

Stiffman: Yeah, I would maybe push back on the word showcase a little bit. It’s built with mass timber and it’s really beautiful and it shows what can be done with mass timber, but the building was built with mass timber because I think that was the smartest way to build that building.  I think if we had built that out of steel pre-engineered system or tiltup walls, I think it would have cost a whole hell of a lot more. We’re not doing this to showcase as a marketing piece. It’s fortunate that it’s so beautiful and it’s acting as a marketing piece, but we’re the owners. We’re paying for this. So we’re doing this as effectively as possible to build ourselves a building that quickly that we can occupy quickly to launch the business because we’re trying to go to market and in a effective way.

SiteNews: We’ve heard a lot from various levels of government about how they want to boost mass timber and pre-fabrication as part of the solution to our housing crisis and a lot of things that we want to build. What do you think has been holding the industry back up until now?

Stiffman: As far as the prefabrication question goes, I think it’s really just supply and demand matching. The people that consume the technology are still really learning about the supply chain and what’s out there. You’re seeing in the designs they’re not fully conducive to say a mass timber module. for instance, what if you designed your whole multi-family building and you’ve designed it all around a 2×6 wall which is 5 and a half inches and the wall panel that we would send is six.  So it’s actually not significant but it becomes significant because the design has already occurred and it’s kind of unintentionally excluded a lot of technologies because they’ve taken it too far without having a building technology in mind or maybe made too many assumptions and it becomes infeasible to switch to prefab. I think what we need to see is along with this new investment in delivering houses is an investment in understanding the supply chain and coming up with more progressive procurement strategy so you can really leverage the benefits of prefab and be able to be more progressive by picking a building technology earlier on so that all of your design decisions make that technology more and more viable, not fighting against the technology.

SiteNews: Kalesnikoff is 80 years old. What do you think are some of the keys to success for keeping a business around for that long?

Stiffman: I can only answer it as the vice president of Mass Timber,  But I’d say historically I bet you if you ask that question to Ken Kalesnikoff, who’s part of the family business’ third generation and our current CEO, he’d probably say stubbornness is how they survived and he’s probably right. There were all sorts of dynamics that the business would have had to navigate to get to where we are today.  From a mass timber perspective, starting Kalesnikoff Mass Timber as a new company and going to market, I think that we’ve really tried to be agile and we’ve really tried to be receptive to what the customer and what the industry wants and needs and solve our customers problem. And you can contrast that to I think some of the groups that have struggled and unfortunately fallen down in that same time period have been very taken the other approach and they’ve been very top down and said, “this is what we make. We’re a kit of parts. We’re going to be a full stop building solution and you have to buy your light bulbs from us and you have to have your building set up to this grid and you really have to be on their program.” And I think that that is too big of a leap for the construction industry right now.

SiteNews: So this is the first facility of its kind in North America. What is the significance of this for Canadian builders and the Canadian construction sector? what sort of possibilities and opportunities does this open up?

Andrew Stiffman: First and foremost the biggest thing that I would really want to convey is there’s a lot of concerns about the capacity of mass timber. This is a huge facility. We have a ton of production capacity.  We have the ability to execute multiple large projects concurrently and really I hope just assuage any concerns from a developer who has a reasonable concern up till now of saying “hey I’m going to latch my horse to mass timber modular and when it comes time for me to build that no one’s going to have production capacity because it’s such a new market.” We’re really hopeful that we can communicate that we’re here we’re open for business. In addition to that, there’s lots of modular companies out there right now, but there’s also lots of concerns from the market about what they’re making. A light frame mod, for instance, we hear plenty of quality concerns. The resulting indoor space can be a little limiting and not the most inspiring space. And for that reason, I think that there is a bit of a stigma against modular for better or for worse. So, we want to come to market with a mass timber mod that has all the benefits of mass timber. It’s beautiful. It’s very high quality. We’re not going to have the quality and water issues from a light frame mod and the racking where the windows are breaking and drywalls cracking. it’s just a superior level quality as well as it’s a beautiful.

SiteNews: Obviously, we’ve been living through some odd times with our trade relationship with the U.S. What do you think is the significance of having, a Canadian solution here in B.C. for people to use?

Andrew Stiffman: I mean, I want to start by saying we’re a B.C. company, but the American market is  where some of our closest and most important foundational relationships are in the states and I think it’s just an unfortunate distraction with some of the messaging coming from the American government. I hope it can end and we can just reach homeostasis again because we’re certainly never going to abandon that market. But for Canadians, I think it’s a time where they want to see homegrown solutions that are scalable and inspiring. They want to see the innovation coming from their own country and some of that is a little bit of protectionism probably sure and to insulate against any trade attacks from the U.S. but I think a lot of that is just enthusiasm and I think it’s just really cool for people in Castleagar and in the Kootenays and in B.C. and more broadly in Canada to see Kalesnikoff making it happen. We’re competitive in L.A., we’re working right here in Castlegar building a daycare, we’re going to build a tower in San Diego. We’re really trying to be a topshelf construction company, manufacturer, mass timber supplier across North America. And I think that that just gets people really excited.

As Vice President of Construction, where do you see some of the biggest opportunities? what are some of the markets that you’re trying to go after? What is the business strategy for Kalishnikov Mass Timber?

Andrew Stiffman: For mass timber, and more broadly CLT panels and glulam beams, I really feel the world is your oyster. We haven’t done a hospital yet but we’re about to start one later this year in downtown Vancouver. It’s basically every type of building that there is, we’ve done that. We’ve built that out of mass timber.  So I think that that’s something that’s really exciting and also that’s enabled us to survive some of the ups and downs of the last tumultuous five years of COVID and trade wars and and having a tough period here is we’re so diversified by product type. So when development is hot, we can capture multi-family work. When development’s slow, we’ve got schools and hospitals and museums to build. We’re really flexible in that way. With modular and prefab, I think that it lends itself really well to two key things. Educational classrooms being a huge one as well as multi-family and rental. And fortunately, those are huge needs for BC, the province, and just North America, Canada more broadly to increase our production and our supply of those types of products. And fortunately for us, I think that’s what Mass Timber modular does best.

SiteNews: What are some of the most asked questions that you get and what are some of the biggest kind of misconceptions or the biggest pieces of misinformation around mass timber that you encounter during your job?

Andrew Stiffman: I want to plug the mass timber ecosystem in B.C. for a minute and say that if you’re a developer or a GC or an owner or any decision maker that’s evaluating mass timber and you have the opportunity to tap into the center of excellence from consultants and contractors and manufacturers right here in B.C., really centered in Vancouver, you have an advantage over pretty much anywhere else in North America that I don’t have to spend that much time educating thanks to being surrounded by so many smart people right here to deliver the projects and speak to their respective disciplines. I can really focus on execution in that way. More broadly, where the technology is newer, for sure, we spend a lot of time executing. We really set the business up to be able to answer all those questions. So we have the engineering, we have the project management, we have estimating, the design, we have all that in house that we can really service every need that the customer might have. So I think that we do a pretty effective job at that. Definitely the two biggest topics rightnow are cost and risk. We hear that all the time. So cost is an important one. We’re cost competitive. We do 200 projects a year and people aren’t coming to us out of the goodness of their heart. It’s because we have a competitive offering. With the sawmill, we are able to mitigate the biggest risk that these projects have which is what happens if you buy your lumbe,r you go out to market and you’re strategic and you try to buy it when lumber pricing is lower and then when it’s time to build lumber pricing escalates someone has to pay for that and it becomes a dispute. Because we’re vertically integrated with proper planning we can guarantee your price point even if that occurs.

SiteNews: Do you have a favorite project that really sticks out in your mind that you’re particularly proud of?

Andrew Stiffman: I think I get really inspired when we see product on projects meeting a need that couldn’t have been met another way. So, for instance, we’re working with a couple developers in Portland, Oregon right now and their model, it’s incredible. They’re focused on delivering affordable housing in and around Portland using mass timber. And from day one they called us. We worked together to align our optimum manufacturing sizes with their floor plans. And they’ve come up with a way of rearranging those floor plans to be architecturally compelling, accommodate the unit mix and different spatial orientations they need and be really effective for manufacturing and therefore cost effective for them as the developer. I think we’re on project six with that group. So, it’s working and they keep coming back because together we’re able to deliver something that I don’t think he could have put together any other way. That’s just one example. there’s so many exciting examples of work that gets me energized. I think that’s what I enjoy most. That’s what I love best about my job and about what we’re doing here.