VARDAMAN VIRTUAL FORESTRY COMPANY

MAKING MONEY GROWING TREES IS THE SAME BIOLOGY-BUSINESS OPERATION FROM SEEDLING TO SAWLOG, AND THE INTERNET IS THE BEST THING EVER TO HAPPEN TO IT

We at JMV&CO are now in our 50^th year of active consulting forestry.  For decades we have operated in every state south of a line from Dallas to Washington, DC.  Even from the outset, our clientele consisted of the private landowners of the region; we have always been intrigued by the problems and fascinated with the opportunities in producing their most visible crops.

But it is only recently that we have recognized that all steps in the operation produce the same physical product until the ultimate consumer harvests it and converts it into something completely different.  Similar expertise is needed to select the species to be grown, assure its establishment naturally or artificially, encourage its rapid growth, predict its development, eliminate its flaws for the final product, and eventually sell it for enough money to produce a suitable return on the required investment.  At every stage of this process, the manager directing it must have at his fingertips all the intellectual tools required for a successful outcome.  Now, finally, we see clearly that it is not enough to provide services in the woods or in the office or in this specialty or that one.  Neither we nor anyone else can master all the required fields, we can only make the necessary knowledge quickly available to everyone.

www.vardaman.com

Utilizing 26 years’ of experience of publishing “Vardaman’s Green Sheet,” our quarterly newsletter, we launched our first Internet site four years ago.  It was relatively new in the consulting field, it carried a pine-timber price-index that we developed and occasional articles on how to grow trees more profitably, and the graphics employed were, we thought, pretty, so we expected great success.  Only when it didn’t come did we realize that, in the classic words of Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis, ours was one of the “Web Pages That Suck.”  It was slow to load on most computers, was rarely revised, and contained little to entice anyone to visit it a second time.  We corrected the navigation problems a year ago and now revise it each week.

www.se-timbersales.com

Three years ago we launched our second site to give maximum exposure to the timber and land sales that have always been major activities for us.  This site was more successful because it got closer to the meat in the coconut by announcing all bids on every sale.  Price indexes for regions or time periods do not really help an individual landowner.  Investors in individual stocks don’t deploy their funds according to the Dow Jones Industrial Average; they care only about the price of an individual issue.  Likewise, a landowner cares only for the prices received in a sale as near identical to his as possible, and these prices strongly determine the success of his timber-growing operation.  Consequently, we installed a link between the two sites to allow switching with one click of the mouse.

The Internet

Although we knew something about the size of the Internet audience (who could miss these statistics?), it took the interplay with our users to open our eyes to the enormous range of their interests and needs.  To respond to it, we started allowing landowners to list their sales free of charge.  Soon thereafter we allowed JMV&CO competitors to do the same.

In the latest upgrade, offered for the first time today, we enable those who list sales to monitor number of responses and average time viewed from their own computers without our help.  To use this new service, list your sale in the prescribed manner and send it to us with your e-mail address.  When we activate it here, we will add “TractID=?” and e-mail the number back to you.  All you need to do then is click on http://www.vardaman.com/stats/Se-tWeeklyStats_02_b.HTM for a report every four hours.

Two months ago, we expanded this listing service to traditional timber buyers.  Almost immediately it evoked calls for help from others.  Now it serves a doctor in Georgia who wants to buy land near his birthplace in Mississippi, a banker in South Carolina who wants to buy timber for a like-kind exchange with his in Arkansas, and the Environmental Banc and Exchange in Maryland that wants to buy low-quality land to be used in environmental mitigation.  We have written the software to allow buyers to monitor responses to their individual listings in a similar manner and even to change their requirements, but we think that two weeks’ testing will be required before it becomes operative.  If you intend to use this service, please post your listing now so that we can assign your “BuyerID” and include it in the testing.

We don’t reveal names of our visitors to outsiders, but our staff members sometimes call them to suggest how better to achieve their apparent goals.  We don’t regard the Friday Reports as SPAM, but we delete immediately anyone who requests removal.

The Goal

This doesn’t begin to scratch the surface.  There are 119,679 landowners on the list still receiving the snail-mail edition of Vardaman’s Green Sheet and an equal number on the inactive list.  Even these are only those whose lands are within 100 road miles of our 10 offices.  The amount of material now on our sites amounts to more than one gigabyte of data; it would cover an estimated 50,000 pages of a normal book and is growing rapidly.  Outside experts have contributed valuable articles and comments on the Discussion Forum.  Soon we’ll develop a search engine to expedite finding material.

We intend to expand all our present Internet services and any others that we can develop or others can suggest.  We won’t rest until all ultimate consumers of trees are in touch with all those who produce them from scratch.  For now these services will be free.  Eventually, however, we’ll charge an appropriate amount.

We invite you to test the benefits of using us now while they’re free.  If they help, tell your friends about us.  They will start getting the Friday Reports when they send us their e-mail addresses.