Build something the world has never seen.

02 · 2009–13

The detour

Leroy took a job at Chick-fil-A, thinking he might become an operator, the person who runs his own Chick-fil-A restaurant. After a year of long hours and little pay, with him and Makaila going deeper into credit card debt, he realized it wasn't the path for him.

He applied everywhere. A recruiter at Enterprise Rent-A-Car believed in him and kept pushing until he was hired at a branch in Suwanee, outside Atlanta. Leroy turned out to be good at sales. He was the top salesperson in his region several times and was promoted to assistant manager, then branch manager in Dunwoody. There he worked up to 70 hours a week, managing as many as ten employees and $2.5 million worth of cars. He called it business boot camp. From there, Georgia-Pacific, the paper and building products company, hired him into a corporate job.

Through all of it, the idea of doing firewood the right way wouldn't leave him alone. Whenever someone mentioned firewood, something welled up inside him. He prayed for God to take the idea out of his head so he could focus on his career. When a flatbed truck came through the Chick-fil-A drive-thru, he'd catch himself wondering how much firewood would fit on the back.

Meanwhile, he was still driving the car he'd been given at 17: a 1993 Geo Prizm from his brother-in-law's parents. By 2013 it had 266,000 miles on it. He and Makaila had a running joke that when it finally died, he would buy a pickup truck and start a firewood business on the side.

03 · 2013

Fired on a Monday

In 2013, the Geo Prizm broke down for good. The repair would have cost $5,000, far more than the car was worth, so Leroy sold it for scrap. That Saturday, while Makaila was at a baby shower, he spent the entire day fasting, praying, singing hymns, and listening to sermons. By the end of the day, he was convinced God was calling him to start the firewood business on the side. When Makaila got home, they talked it through and agreed on a plan: he would keep his job at Georgia-Pacific and build the business in his spare time.

On Monday morning, Georgia-Pacific fired him on the spot, saying he wasn't a good fit.

“Apparently this isn't going to be part-time.”

The firewood business was now the family's only hope for income, and it didn't exist yet. Leroy and Makaila had just paid off all their debt except the mortgage, so they had no savings to draw on. He applied for as many credit cards as he could get. He took out a personal loan to buy a used F-350 flatbed truck and a 20-foot trailer, both of which Makaila found on Craigslist. He took out another loan for a mini skid steer to unload wood at customers' homes. He still needed dry firewood to sell, so he approached a firewood company near Mableton that had a kiln. The lot manager took a liking to him and agreed to sell him wood. Leroy named the new business Cutting Edge Firewood.

04 · 2013–14

The first season

Finding customers turned out to be harder than finding wood. Leroy assumed his customers would be wealthy families, so he mailed a few thousand flyers to neighborhoods around country clubs north of Atlanta. He got two customers. He spent several hot August days handing out free samples and got one or two more. A friend of his brother's built a simple website with a logo and photos so people could call in orders. What finally worked was Google Ads. He spent $19,000 on them that first season, and the phone started ringing.

Every delivery took real work. Leroy drove the loaded truck and trailer through tight neighborhoods, some with dead-end streets that had no warning signs. Once, he spent two hours backing the trailer out of a single dead-end street. At each house, he unstrapped the load and drove the 2,000-pound skid steer down a pair of narrow ramps, which was dangerous even when they weren't wet or frozen. He used it to get the wood as close as he could to where the customer wanted it, then stacked it by hand. The average delivery took about two hours. He made them in all kinds of weather, including days when it was 33 degrees and pouring rain.

One of his first customers sent him a six-paragraph email. It said he seemed like a nice kid, but firewood was a horrible business idea and he should shut it down. Leroy ignored it and kept going. In late January 2014, with Makaila nine months pregnant, a surprise snowstorm shut down Atlanta. It took Leroy eight and a half hours to get home from his last delivery. Their first daughter was born a few days later. By the end of that first winter, the business had brought in about $100,000 in revenue.

05 · 2014

$12 in the bank

Almost all firewood is sold in the fall and winter, so the business would bring in very little money from spring until the weather turned cold again. When the first season ended, Leroy had about $30,000 in the bank and figured that would carry the family through the summer. Then the truck broke down, and the repair cost $10,000. The water heater went out at their house, and then at their old house in Rome, which they still owned and were renting out. A few ideas he tried for making money over the summer didn't work. Makaila was home with the baby, so there was no second income. On top of that, Leroy still owed more than $150,000 in credit card debt and loans from starting the business.

Makaila asked whether one of them should go get a job. Leroy told her that if he got another job, God would probably just get him fired from that one too. He believed this was what God wanted him to do. But by late July, they were down to $12 in the bank.

Leroy had started the company because he believed God had called him to it. Now he curled up on the floor and cried out, asking God why He had forced him into a business that was about to go bankrupt. That Sunday, after church, he went forward to pray with one of the elders. When he got home, he read a sermon about the Israelites, who had watched God part the Red Sea and then doubted Him as soon as they ran low on water in the desert. Leroy realized he was doing the same thing. He broke down, wept, and repented.

06 · 2014–15

Booked five weeks out

The next day, a restaurant called wanting about $2,000 worth of firewood to decorate its dining room. It was by far the biggest sale Leroy had ever made. While he was making that delivery, a man walked up, said he owned a firewood company, and offered to sell it to Leroy. It was his closest competitor. For years, that company had shown up first when people in Atlanta searched for firewood on Google. It had a list of about 600 past customers with their names, phone numbers, and addresses. The owner asked $45,000. Leroy had about $2,000 in the bank, but he believed the offer was God's answer. A few more unexpected sales came in, and he borrowed the rest from a high-interest online lender. On September 1, 2014, after talking the price down to $19,000, he bought the company's website and customer list.

He emailed every customer on both lists, his own and the one he'd just bought, and the orders poured in. At one point he was booked five weeks out: when someone called in early October, the soonest he could deliver was mid-November. That season brought in about $375,000, nearly four times the first year. Leroy worked 100 to 110 hours a week, leaving at 4 a.m. and getting home at 9 or 10 at night, Monday through Saturday. Makaila was home with their daughter and pregnant with their second. She spent 50 to 60 hours a week scheduling deliveries, answering calls, and paying bills, then stayed up at night making fire starters to sell.

To speed up deliveries, Leroy bought a box truck with a liftgate that could lift the skid steer, so he no longer had to strap everything onto a trailer. Because he had almost no other expenses, the season ended with a six-figure profit, and Leroy paid off every dollar of credit card debt.

07 · 2015–16

The bet that almost broke him

Leroy was still buying all of his wood from the company near Mableton, and he felt God was telling him to become his own supplier. After a year like that one, he figured a bank or an investor would fund it. He spent the spring and summer of 2015 pitching anyone who would listen. But as soon as he said the word “firewood,” the conversation was over, and some people laughed at him.

In August, the lot manager at his supplier called to give him a heads-up: they were going out of business. Leroy took over the operation himself, including the lot and an old, inefficient kiln built for drying lumber. It was expensive. Rent was $10,000 a month, enough to wipe out the previous year's profit, and the kiln's natural gas service cost $8,000 a month even if he didn't use it. He also had to hire a crew to process and dry the wood.

To pay for it all, he planned to become a backup supplier for Publix and Kroger. He knew from his college days that no firewood company had ever kept up with their demand, and the supplier he was replacing had been Publix's main supplier. He spent about $100,000 on equipment, bags, and staff to get ready.

A large company from another state won the Publix business instead. Then Georgia had its warmest winter on record, with highs in the upper 70s at Christmas. Cutting Edge didn't sell a single bag of wood to Publix, Kroger, or anyone else, and the new facility burned through tens of thousands of dollars a month. By January 2016, he was out of money. He took a nine-month loan of about $60,000 at nearly 30% interest, with payments of $250 a day, and before long he was out of money again. One day he needed $10,000 for rent and had a couple hundred dollars in the bank, so he sold a piece of equipment to make the payment.

He tried selling his extra wood to restaurants, but a cheaper competitor undercut him. Then that same competitor offered a deal. It would buy his restaurant accounts and extra wood and handle part of his home deliveries to his standards. Leroy didn't trust them, but the alternative was bankruptcy, so he signed. They didn't keep their end of the deal, and he ended up making half of the deliveries himself. In early 2017, he walked away from the partnership.

08 · 2017

All in

When he walked away, Leroy had some debt, an outdated website, a box truck, and his customer list, but no supplier and no money to start over. He tried to get a second mortgage on their house and went to every bank he could find: local, national, even international. None of them were interested.

So he went to Makaila, who was eight months pregnant with their third daughter, and asked if they could sell their house and put the money into the business. She said yes. With that money, Leroy rebuilt Cutting Edge. He upgraded the brand and the website and moved into a warehouse with an office and showroom. He hired a customer service rep and the company's first delivery driver other than himself, a role he called “delivery artisan.”

Around the same time, two firewood suppliers called him out of the blue asking to supply Cutting Edge, the only time that ever happened. Leroy went to their facilities and taught them to dry wood to his standard. That meant at least 48 hours in the kiln at 250 degrees, dry enough to burn without sizzling, easy to light, and stored indoors until it shipped.

09 · 2017–18

The rack

Deliveries were still slow and physically hard, because every order had to be stacked by hand. So Leroy reinvented how firewood gets delivered. He designed a metal rack, two feet wide and four feet tall, and had it manufactured, airbrushed, and fitted with a canvas cover bearing the new gold Cutting Edge logo. A delivery artisan could roll a full rack on a special hand truck across a yard or up a flight of stairs. They could leave it right where the customer wanted it, even in an upstairs bedroom or out on a rooftop. When the customer reordered, the team swapped the empty rack for a full one. Deliveries dropped from about two hours to fifteen minutes, and the design later earned U.S. Patent 10,829,140.

At first, Leroy offered the rack as an add-on that customers could buy and keep. He sold only four. So in 2018, he built it into the business model: Cutting Edge stopped selling larger loads and sold wood only by the rack, at roughly double the old price. It was a risky move that could have sunk the company, but it worked. Customers got a faster, cleaner delivery and a good-looking rack with the logo on it, which thousands of their guests and neighbors would see. They loved it even more.

10 · 2019–20

4× in one year

Cutting Edge had been investing in search engine optimization, and it worked almost too well. When people anywhere in the country searched for firewood, Cutting Edge came up. The phone kept ringing with orders from Indiana, California, Oregon, and New York that Leroy had to turn away. In 2019 he decided to try shipping, even though he didn't expect it to work. Cutting Edge started sending boxes of firewood and cooking wood (wood for grilling, smoking, and pizza ovens) nationwide. It also shipped an “ultimate package” of five racks that arrived with its own hand truck. Freight companies weren't known for their customer service, so each shipment came with a box of hickory and a note apologizing in advance. Customers loved it. Before long, cooking wood made up about 20% of revenue, and about half of revenue came from outside Georgia.

Back in Atlanta, Leroy started putting Cutting Edge yard signs in front of customers' homes. For years, when he told people at networking events that he owned a firewood company, they changed the subject to the weather or sports. A few months after the signs went up, people started asking, “Is that the company with the yard signs everywhere?” When new customers were asked how they'd heard of Cutting Edge, nine out of ten mentioned the signs.

Then came 2020 and COVID. Leroy bought wood far in advance, had his suppliers build up stock, doubled the warehouse space, and hired and trained delivery artisans and customer service staff ahead of demand. Between shipping and COVID, Cutting Edge grew 4× in a single year, and it could have grown even more if it had been able to keep up. Atlanta Business Chronicle named it one of the city's fastest-growing companies in 2021 and 2022.

11 · 2021–23

The hardest chapter

With the company growing that fast, Leroy decided it was time to bring in experienced people to help him scale. A business mentor he trusted was restructuring his own company, so the mentor's COO came over to help run Cutting Edge. The COO brought in a leadership team: a director of operations, a part-time CFO, a part-time CMO, and a head of customer service. Only one of them worked out. The rest weren't willing to learn the business from the ground up by doing deliveries, taking phone orders, or working in the warehouse. They pushed back on the things that had made Cutting Edge successful, including the yard signs. Before they arrived, the company was on pace to double again in 2021. Instead, it grew a little less than 50%, and overhead ballooned.

Then the mentor advised Leroy to take out a bridge loan, a large, short-term loan meant to carry a company until new investors come in. He said he had investors lined up, and the COO supported the plan. Leroy trusted them and took a seven-figure loan due in two months. When the two months were up, no investors came. The loan went into default, which meant nearly all of Cutting Edge's cash went to paying it down. That put the company at risk of missing payments on its SBA loan, a government-backed small business loan secured by a lien on Leroy's family home.

A few months later, in April, Leroy's fourth daughter was born. When he came back to work, the mentor and the COO called him into a meeting with an offer: they would let him keep his house if he signed the company over to them. He had only a couple of weeks of cash left to make payroll. Leroy asked for 48 hours. He went home, prayed, and made a Hail Mary call to a customer he knew was wealthy. That customer had sold a business of his own and was starting a family office, a firm that invests one family's money. He came in as an investor, the bridge loan was paid off, and Leroy kept his company. He rebuilt the leadership team and made Cutting Edge profitable again.

12 · 2024

The exit

With Cutting Edge stable and profitable again, Leroy started thinking about what was next. Firewood is a hard product to scale, and after eleven years he wanted to go build bigger things. In 2024, he sold Cutting Edge Firewood to the investor who had come in the year before. By then, the company he started with one pickup truck and a trailer had been featured on the Today Show, Fox & Friends, and Netflix. It had served celebrities, billionaires, and Fortune 500 CEOs, and its firewood had burned in the Oval Office. It had also inspired hundreds of imitators. That same year, Berry College, where his first firewood venture started, gave him its Entrepreneurial Spirit Award.

13 · Now

Building again

Since the exit, Leroy has shared his story with college students, business owners, and executives. In 2026, he hosted Ritz-Carlton co-founder Horst Schulze, who had been a Cutting Edge customer, for a fireside chat. Now he's building his next company. It's in stealth for now, and it runs on the same playbook that built Cutting Edge: find the thing everyone else has settled for, then set a standard nobody can follow.