The Camper Van End Game: Interview with Married Couple and Love Logs co-founders, Paul Strachan and Heather Emery
This week’s interview is with Paul Strachan and Heather Emery, the UK-based married couple behind Love Logs, an online retailer that sells plastic-free, sustainable firewood.
Like many of us, Paul and Heather found themselves captivated by a business idea inspired by a problem they’d encountered in real life. Paul is an avid cook, and he and Heather were incredibly disappointed by the experience they had buying and using firewood for their new pizza oven. They knew there could be a better alternative. Only they didn’t stop at the idea - they ended up quitting their jobs to launch the business and run it full-time. Four years later - they’re still going. They’ve navigated Covid and changing political environments, moved from operating their own warehouse to a drop-ship model, and recently expanded their business to the US market.
I wanted to know: What’s it actually like to quit your job to run with a business idea? How have they navigated the stops and starts along the way? What’s their perspective on taking risks to expand the business? What have they learned about what they each need to recharge and weather the tough moments?
We spoke about all of that, as well as:
How thinking about what they’d regret helped them decide to launch the US market
How two high performance people learned to trust each other and not try to control everything
The impact of creating boundaries around when they can talk about work (hint: Not while reading a book before bed)
The camper van end game they’re building towards
Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. While every effort has been made to preserve the integrity of the conversation, please be aware that the quotes may not be verbatim but reflect the essence of the dialogue.
Let’s start with a few quick questions to set the scene.
Where do you live?
Heather: Right now we’re in the UK in a place called Shropshire, which is a really beautiful and picturesque part of the country on the border with Wales. We recently moved from the middle of nowhere. We realized that it’s just the two of us working together, and we need to live near other people because otherwise we only ever see each other. When we met we were living in the second biggest city in the UK, and then we moved to a very rural area. Now we live somewhere that is in between and perfect for us. When we started the business, Paul and I were packing every box of logs ourselves, and we were very much tied to a warehouse in a particular place. We moved to a 100% dropship model last July, which gave us the freedom to go wherever and work from wherever we wanted.
How would you describe what you do for work?
Paul: I’d say the short description of the business is that we brought firewood into the 21st century. I had an idea, and at the time, Heather was working in the fashion sector running logistics for fashion companies. The idea was to combine this idea around firewood with modern service levels. Day to day, I’d describe our responsibilities as a little bit of everything. A Venn diagram is a good way of thinking about it. We both have some obvious and distinct roles that the other person can't do and then there’s quite a bit of overlap where we decide who’s doing what day to day. It’s very dynamic. We have less structure than I've ever had in my professional career. Sometimes things just have to get done and you have to ask: “Who’s going to drop everything and get that thing done?”
I’d say for the first, maybe 6 or 12 months, we were both trying to control everything and then we figured out what we were each good at and learned to trust the other person. We’d both come from very different backgrounds, and neither of us had ever done anything like this before. Now it’s easier to say, “I’m happy to leave that task with you.”
Heather: It really is dynamic. It’s weird to have to be in creative writing mode writing a blog post, and then be in spreadsheet mode calculating profitability from the last month. Especially when we had the warehouse, we would literally go from cleaning a warehouse floor and carrying boxes and logs around all day, to being bone tired back at home having to think creatively about our strategy. I’ll sit down and plan my week around what I’m going to do each day. It never works out like that because something always comes up. Chaos is the short way to describe it.
There are tons of people out there who have said, “Okay, I have an idea. I wonder what it would be like if I quit my job and started a business?” You two have actually done it. What's the most honest way you would describe what it’s actually like to do that?
Heather: The word we use all the time is roller coaster. Some days, it’s awesome. We can give ourselves the day off and go and do whatever. Last weekend, we hosted an event called “The UK's Best Home Pizza Chef” where we took entries online and got the public to vote for finalists. We invited all of our partners and had such a fun weekend. It was cool to be able to say, “We did this, and everybody said it was amazing.”
And then other days it can be much different. The weather has not been good here recently. We're selling cooking wood and charcoal so the whole month of May and early June have been tough from a sales perspective. You sit there and ask yourself, “Are we going to have enough money to pay the bills by the end of the summer if this carries on?” You really have to ride out the bad times and focus on the highs.
Paul: It's scary to do it. We were in a pretty lucky position when we set this business up. We'd each sold a house and bought one together. We were in a really good cash position for two people in their thirties. Heather quit her job first, and I kept mine. I could pay the mortgage. There were no worries at that point, and then three months in, it was just too busy for Heather to do on her own. I quit my job, and that's when you really have to ask, “How much money do we have in the bank today? And when does that run out?” Four years in we still do that calculation today.
We've often said, “When will we get to the point where we don't have to worry anymore?” The bottom line is unless we get to a point where we stop trying to grow the business or stop taking risks to go in new directions that might never work, that scary feeling is always going to be there, no matter how well the business is doing. A good example at the moment is that we’ve launched in the US. It’s been a completely different experience setting up the market than the UK, and it’s scary.
Heather: Some days, we’ll think, “Oh, if we’d never done that, we’d be in this comfortable cash position.” We hope it’ll pay off and there’s the risk that it won’t, but we knew we’d hate ourselves if we didn’t at least give it a try.
I think there are a lot of people who read the blog and run businesses who are thinking about making a big investment and struggling with, “Do I do it? Do I not?” What mindset helped you get comfortable with making that decision?
Heather: When we started, we only sold to the UK. We don't ship internationally because a big part of our value is sustainability and reducing road miles. We always assumed we’d stay UK-based, but we started getting emails from customers asking us to ship to the US. That’s when we thought, maybe there’s a market here. We originally talked about launching the US about two and a half years ago. We’d found a provider but everything had been done over Zoom (this was right after lockdown). Two days before we were about to put in a big order with cash that meant a lot to the business, the provider went quiet on us. We decided it was too risky. At the time, we were operating our warehouse and couldn't just fly to the States and meet the providers. We decided that we couldn’t do it until we could look into people's eyes, shake their hands, and have the confidence that they weren’t going to fuck us over. A contract is only worth what you’re willing to enforce it, and that would’ve been something we weren’t in a position to do at the time. So we stuck a pin in it for two years. Once we moved to a drop-ship model and had the time to invest, we decided that it was time to look at it again because we could actually go meet the providers in person.
Paul: For me, it’s about weighing the risk versus the opportunity. The California economy is bigger than the British economy. If we can get the American market right, it’s a huge opportunity for us. I have a friend who expanded his business here in the UK. The expansion didn't work out, but something he said about it stuck with me. He said, “I never would have lived with myself if I hadn’t done it because I would’ve always said, ‘What if I tried?’” For me, that just said it all. We knew we’d regret it if we didn’t try, and we could afford it. It definitely made things tighter. We have some things we really want to do like buy a camper van and travel around Europe working remotely, but the US investment had to come over the personal decision, and that’s okay.
I think anyone who starts a business logically knows that it’s not going to be a linear process. It’s easy to know that, but much harder to mentally deal with all the stops and starts along the way. Those stops and starts can make you feel like you’re failing, even though they are a natural part of the process. Does that resonate with you? If so, what would you say to someone starting a business to help them prepare for that?
Heather: To be honest, I was prepared for the stops and starts during the first year. I don't think I was prepared for them in years 2, 3, and 4. It's difficult and all about finding the good to look for when the bad is happening. For example, we’ve always had a focus on quality and sustainability that we won’t compromise on. We could’ve made a lot more money and done things a lot more cheaply had we not focused on those things. But we said, “No, they're important to us,” and, as a result, we've always had really good reviews from our customers. On the days when sales are low, especially during the first 6 months of the business, we’d console ourselves by looking at the good reviews and the good things our customers said about us. That enabled us to say, “There is a market for this. We just haven't found our people yet, but look at these great things people are saying. We know that they're out there, and we know we can find more people like that.”
Paul: I probably struggled with it more than Heather. I don't think there’s any preparing for it. I think that’s why 999 out of every 1,000 people don’t do something like this. The good is going to come, the bad is going to come, and you either get through that or you don't. We're very, very lucky, again, that there are two of us because I think if I were doing this on my own, it'd be even harder to take.
Heather: We started during lockdown in 2021 in the UK where they said you can socialize but only outside in your gardens. So for a company like us selling pizza oven wood and charcoal, it was amazing. We saw this phenomenal growth over those first few months. We thought, “We're getting there. This is going to be amazing!” And then literally everything dropped off a cliff for a few months. When you first start, you know it's not going to be easy. You know there are going to be lots of ups and downs, and you're okay with that. A year in, when we felt like we were flying and then we fell off that cliff, it was really hard to take.
The political landscape has been all over the place since we first started. We’ve never traded in a normal economy and political environment. Because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we had a boom for our products this winter when there was a fuel crisis here and electricity was really expensive. But then we’ve had really difficult times like now when we have a general election coming up. Confidence tends to be low in the run-up to an election and people stop spending as much money. So right now we’ve got bad weather and a low confidence period, but our business has still marginally grown over last year. You have to look at that and be able to take away the good.
I want to double-click on that. What helps each of you rebound after a day when you feel like everything is terrible and nothing’s working?
(Both immediately laugh)
Paul: This is one of our problems as a couple running a business. Our approach is different. I like to internalize those things. I don't ignore them, but I don't feel the need to vocalize them and have a rant, whereas Heather likes to get it out of her system vocally, the way that you might with a colleague in a normal office. For me, I think about, “What else can I focus on to go and take my mind off of this?” whereas Heather will want to talk about it. That can cause the odd problem for us.
I wonder if this will resonate. My boyfriend is also an entrepreneur. One thing we've struggled with is figuring out when the other person needs to vent versus having someone help them brainstorm solutions. I love to fix things and throw out solutions, and he'll say, “I just need to be mad about this for a minute.”
Paul: We’re the opposite. Heather will say something and I’ll comment, “Oh, have you thought about this?” Of course, she’s thought about it - it’s her part of the business!
Heather: Or you’ll say “Don’t be negative” and I’ll say, “I'm not being negative, I just have to acknowledge the thing that went wrong to be able to come up with a solution.” I have to acknowledge that something's gone wrong first, or I’ll just stew on it. I think all the standard things people recommend really do work: Get outside and get some exercise.
The other thing is we’d be lying in bed at 10:30, and one of us would go, “Oh, did you pay that invoice?” Or “Oh no, it's been a bad sales day,” or “Oh, have you seen this?” We had to stop doing that because you’ve got to have some sort of boundaries.
Paul: We don't keep standard working hours, but, generally, we’ll get up in the morning and then work beyond a certain point. In the evening, we’ll ask permission to talk about the business. We’ll actually ask, “Can I talk to you about a work thing?” And if the answer is no, then we’ll wait until the morning.
What impacts have you noticed from setting up those boundaries?
Paul: Worry less. Sleep better. It’s hard enough getting into bed when your mind is already stewing about work. If you’re out of that zone, just relaxing and reading a book, and then your partner chooses to talk about work and puts you back in that zone, it’s not good. It gives you more control of your thoughts to have those boundaries.
Heather: We literally had this last night. Paul turned to me at 11:00 and asked, “Can I talk to you about work?” I said, “No, I'm reading my book. I'm done. We'll talk about it in the morning.” I was glad we didn’t talk about it because I got a good night's sleep, and it was totally fine to talk about it at 8:00am. Three years ago, he probably wouldn’t have asked, and I’d have been annoyed because now I'm thinking about it. Then we’d have woken up in the morning and not slept well. It depends on how urgent it is – if a customer emails us with a problem, we’ll deal with it no matter the time. But if it can wait, then it probably should.
That resonates in a big way. One thing I wanted to go back to was the time pressure element when you talked about running calculations on your cash position. Sometimes, time pressure can be a positive forcing function, whereas other times it can be negative because it becomes all you can think about. What’s your perspective? How do you manage the time pressure element so that it doesn’t get in the way of your performance?
Heather: I think the good thing about being a couple is that everything we do is a team effort. We’ll go, “This is the work problem and you deal with that, and I'll go and deal with all the house and life admin stuff.” It’s nice because it feels like you only have to be stressed about one thing at a time.
Paul: We don't have a working life and a separate outside-of-work life. We just have a life with lots and lots of things on the to-do list. We moved into this new house in December and had this long list of things we wanted to do with the house. There's a tendency to deprioritize them over the business-related stuff, and I think that’s not always the way to think about it. Over the last month or two, I've started building some of the house stuff into my day-to-day working life, and there’s been a noticeable impact on how much life has improved.
We did three years of having our own warehouse where the number of orders in equals the amount of work you have to do out. Now that we don’t have to do that anymore, we’re figuring out how to manage our diaries again. I think we're now at a point where we're managing our days more like I would’ve in a past life when I wasn’t working in a warehouse.
Heather: I think the other thing about working all hours is that you have to make time for yourself. The gym is really important to me. We've had such a busy week this week so I haven't been able to go to the gym. Today I said, “No matter what happens today, I have to get there because I will be so miserable otherwise that I won't be productive.” We’ll have periods where we let it lapse, but, fortunately, we have a dog so we’re forced to get outside and walk every morning. It really does help. I've been in jobs where you just work all the time, and you use being tired as an excuse to not work out, which doesn’t end up making you feel any better.
We're also lucky because Paul has to cook a lot of amazing food over the barbecue for the business so we eat really well and have a healthy dinner most nights. There are days when we work a lot and have to get takeaway, but we don’t make that a habit. Eating healthy ~80% of the time definitely helps with not feeling sluggish. If you don’t have energy, you can’t bring your A-game.
Earlier you talked about how you were both trying to control everything in the beginning and gradually learned to trust each other. What helped you both get to the point where you could do that and were better able to divide and conquer?
Paul: Lots of arguing about stuff (both start laughing). I think we both were doing a lot of new things that neither of us had ever done before, and we were both used to being high performers in our jobs. I think it was natural for both of us to think, “Oh, I’m going to be able to do that.” Particularly as the first year went on, we realized there were things we just couldn’t do. I’m more creative than Heather so anything around the brand, graphic design, and photography became things that I was better at and enjoyed more. I am an awful planner whereas Heather is incredibly good at it. I had never run a P&L before, whereas Heather had run international budgets and naturally gravitated towards that. It happened naturally, and as we consciously started to pick up on it, we were able to talk about it and adjust.
Heather: I think it also comes with just having no time. When you’re so busy, you have to sit down and talk about it. We try to be good about having structured team meetings where you go through everything and talk about who is doing what. Before we would just talk about things we were working on, and then both try and do everything.
Somebody asked me about this at the event this past weekend. They asked, “What's it like working together and being married?” We always say, “Oh, it's really difficult at the start.” When I finished the conversation I felt like I’d made it sound negative, but it's actually really positive. We enjoy it, and it's really nice to go through this with another person.
Paul: There's no part of me that ever thinks, “God, I wish I was doing this on my own.” I spent 15 years in recruitment before I did this, and I’d occasionally come across somebody looking for a job who had been running a business with his wife. I’d always look at that and think, “That's weird. Why would you ever want to do that?” Now I get why that could be a great experience.
Many people I interview for the No Directions blog have created lives that are uniquely theirs in terms of how they live, work, and build their lives. What does the life that is uniquely yours look like today?
Heather: We're really lucky that we can manage our own schedules so when the business isn't so busy, we can really take advantage of that. We’ll have a chill morning and walk the dog together. We get to do loads of really fun stuff through the business, like the pizza competition we hosted this past weekend. We’ve also exhibited at festivals where when it's over, we’ll get free drinks and go watch performances after. We've been able to do a lot of fun stuff through the business that just becomes our fun time spent together.
Paul: A big word for me is freedom. The reason I could never go back to doing what I did before or working for anybody else would be the lack of freedom. We’re currently looking to buy a camper van or motor home at the end of the summer. The plan is for us to chase the sun. As the autumn of the fall comes to the UK, we’ll drop down into Europe and move somewhere warmer. I don't think it’ll be permanent for a while, probably two or three months where we can just go somewhere warmer, come back for Christmas, go away again, and then return for summer in the UK. The exclusive goal of having the business is freedom and driving our income level to a point where we can comfortably do that. I'd feel done at that point - like we had everything we needed.
Heather: We’ve flip-flopped between: Do we want a nice lifestyle business that earns us enough to travel, do nice things, and have the freedom to be able to do that? Or do we want to work our asses off, cut corners, and make as much money as we can so that we can sell it for millions? The sacrifices required to get there would be a lot greater and there would be more uncertainty. We've both worked in corporate jobs where you work all the time and are constantly dealing with all the corporate bullshit. We decided that we didn’t want that, and we didn’t need more money than some nice holidays and some nice meals.
Paul: We don't need any more money than we were earning when we met. When you meet somebody who's earning good money like you are, you realize that you can do lots of nice things, but the thing you are short on is time. If we can just get back to that level of earnings through this business, I think we'll take stock and say, “We’re probably done. We don't need to go all out anymore.”