Living out the start of a rags-to-riches story, Merlo believed in the 1950s that a little guy, lean and scrappy, could be competitive against a flabby giant. In nine years he had moved up the corporate ladder of Rounds and Kilpatrick Lumber Company—from sales clerk, to vice president of sales, and finally vice president and general manager, heading up both the sales office in San Francisco and the remanufacturing plant in Cloverdale, CA. In the process, he learned not only about the redwood market and its U.S. customers, but about the small mill owners in Mendocino County and the workers that shored them up. “These were people that didn’t come from the big companies,” Merlo said. “Big companies operated on the assumption that they didn’t need to be efficient to survive in the market—in other words, they didn’t have to worry about overrun.” For those not familiar with timber industry terms, the definition of overrun comes down to this: did you get the amount of rectangular boards that you originally estimated would come from the round log—or even more?