ORFORD — It’s 7 a.m. on a raw April morning and Stacey Thomson is mucking out a clogged drain.
Thomson and a work crew of three just pried open a manhole cover at the car wash he owns adjacent to Kinney Drugs at the intersection of routes 5 and 25 in Bradford, Vt. They are lowering a pump by rope into an underground drainage tank to suck out the mud that has collected there from the underside of customers’ vehicles.
He grabs a 20-foot-long shovel and begins scooping out the silt clogging the manhole and tossing it into the bucket of a Caterpillar loader.
“You ever see Dirty Jobs?” Thomson asks, referring to the Discovery Channel show that profiles (mostly) men in rough trades that involve heavy machinery, harsh conditions and strenuous physical labor. The reality show isn’t a competition, but that doesn’t deter Thomson. “I could win that whole show if they just let me,” he said.
When it comes to dirty jobs, there is barely one that Thomson is unwilling to tackle — so much so that he has built a business empire out of them.
Beginning with a skidder and truck for hauling logs 21 years ago, he now controls a half-dozen Orford businesses that encompass trucking, timber harvesting, excavation, sand and gravel supply, heavy equipment rentals, sandblasting and painting for industrial vehicles, commercial and residential real estate, storage units, propane distribution, retail gasoline sales — and the car wash.
Thomson’s fleet of heavy equipment is now enough to burn through 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year doing a lot of dirty jobs.
“I hate doing the same thing every day,” he explains.
Thomson’s work is grounded — literally and figuratively— in the rural economy of New Hampshire and Vermont. While development boards and policymakers struggle with ways to bring Upper Valley into the 21st century by attracting more high-tech manufacturing, Thomson has found opportunity in servicing landowners, farmers and municipalities in their prosaic needs to have land cleared, earth moved and heavy equipment maintained.
Captivated by monster-size machinery since he was a kid, Thomson spends much of his day in his Ford F-250 pickup with license plates that spell ORFORD shuttling among his businesses ventures in Orford and Bradford, and sites around the Upper Valley where he has been contracted to do excavation jobs.
“It works much better to get my arms around it if I can see it all in less than a day,” he said.
A long reach is becoming increasingly necessary, however.
Over the years, Thomson has acquired major real estate holdings on both sides of the Connecticut River, with property in Orford, Bradford, Vershire, Piermont and Warren. He estimates his holdings at 800 to 850 acres. Most of it is timberland, but he has significant parcels that he would like to subdivide for lots for new homes.
Sitting in the cab of his pickup truck one recent afternoon at his Bradford car wash, Thomson said he has ambitions to expand his commercial real estate holdings.
“Anything from here to Main Street in Bradford I have my eye on,” he said.
He has already taken action. At a February foreclosure auction, Thomson bought the former used auto dealership property A Notch Above on Route 5 for $250,000, and he plans to find a commercial tenant.
Looking for opportune real estate investments through auctions is part of Thomson’s business plan.
He bought the former Perry’s Oil property on Main Street in Bradford in 2017 and opened his own propane distribution business and gas pumps. That same year, he showed up at the auction of the West Lebanon Main Street building that houses Shyrl’s Diner but lost to another bidder.
The Thomson name is practically synonymous with Orford.
An only child, Thomson grew up in the town a few miles from his base of operations on Route 10. His father, Tom Thomson, runs an award-winning sustainable tree farm in Orford, and his grandfather, Meldrim Thomson Jr., served three terms as a Republican governor of New Hampshire. The family ran a law book publishing company based in Orford for many years before selling it in 1989.
Although Stacey Thomson, 41, said he was never much one for rebelling in high school — photographs on the wall in his office of him as a teenager working in a woodlot show a deadly serious expression on his face — classroom learning did not come easy.
“Stacey was no troublemaker,” said Louise Mack, who knew Thomson when he was growing up, when she was one of his grandfather’s first employees.
Thomson himself later would bring his paperwork to her every Sunday at 7 a.m. when he had begun his own trucking business in 1998.
But “he had a hard time in school,” she said.
Rather, Thomson excelled at hands-on learning.
Thomson credits the heavy equipment operations and maintenance program taught by Fred Bishop at River Bend Career and Technical Center in Bradford, where he attended classes through in high school, as opening his eyes to wide possibilities.
“The vocational program was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Thomson said.
After school, on weekends and during the summers, Thomson worked at Connecticut Valley Trucking in Orford. Within six months, at age 19, he was in the cab of a big rig hauling logs and wood around New Hampshire — although he still was too young to cross state lines.
Thomson learned his trade under Connecticut Valley Trucking owner Ron Taylor, whom he credits with providing valuable real-world experience.
“Ron taught me a lot about fixing trucks and hauling wood,” Thomson said.
Taylor, a no-nonsense Yankee who is sparing with words, suggested Thomson was eager to enter adulthood and quickly demonstrated an unusual capability and drive for his age.
“He was insistent,” Taylor said, recalling the 18-year-old Thomson who came to work for him. “He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”
By the time he turned 21 in 1998, Thomson was ready to go solo.
“I always knew I wanted to do my own thing,” he said.
With his own savings and a $75,000 loan from Woodsville Guaranty Savings Bank, he bought a used John Deere skidder — a piece of heavy equipment used to pull tree trunks out of the woods.
Then Thomson acquired a used 1994 Western Star log carrier (a framed picture of it sits on his office desk today).
To drum up business, he’d scour property records at town halls to identify property owners “who owned 40 or 50 acres that they’d want cleared.”
Thomson said he recently saw a photo of his old Western star truck posted on Facebook. When asked how he could be sure after so many years that it was the same one, Thomson replied with conviction: “You never forget your first truck.”
The skidder and truck formed the backbone of Thomson Timber Trucking and Harvesting LLC, formed in 2000.
In the beginning, when he working by himself, business was slow. Thomson had to work full time through the weekends hauling round bales of hay to Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island to earn enough money so he could pay his bank loan, because he wasn’t making enough from his nascent logging business.
“I’d haul anything that could be hauled,” he said.
Within a few years, Thomson hired his first employee — John Allen, a former Connecticut Valley Trucking driver, who still works for Thomson today.
“I kind of showed Stacey the ropes when he came to work at Conn Valley,” said Allen, who is responsible for hauling truckloads of logs and pulpwood harvested by the company to sawmills in the Twin States.
In 2001, Thomson formed Stacey Thomson Properties LP, of which Stacey Thomson Management LLC is the general partner, to encompass real estate investments.
In 2007, he added Thomson Auto Body LLC, a business to sandblast and paint trucks and heavy equipment, and in 2013, Thomson formed Simply Clean Carwash LLC when he acquired the Bradford car wash business.
That same year, he created J & C Holdings LLC to manage commercial real estate properties.
Finally, Thomson formed Thomson Fuels LLC in 2018 after he acquired the former Perry’s Oil property and launched a propane fuel distribution business, which now has more than 250 customers and 90 fuel oil customers.
“I thought he was crazy, absolutely insane,” Jay Clark, manager of Thomson’s fuel business, said about his reaction when Thomson approached him to head up the operation. Clark, a Thetford Center hay farmer who previously had worked at AmeriGas, said the heavily regulated propane business is governed by arcane financial markets and subject to myriad safety issues.
“No one does that,” Clark said.
Today, Thomson employs between 20 to 25 people, depending on the time of year, across his many different businesses. Employees, he said, need to be flexible. They could find themselves working in the woods on a timber harvesting contract one day, excavating a sand pit the next, or manning the firewood lot across from Farm-Way in Bradford the day after that.
Coordinating much of the disparate operations is Kendra Ricker, Thomson’s de-facto chief of staff, who handles everything from invoicing to making sure Thomson has the required permits to operate and is in compliance with government regulations to lease out properties and heavy equipment. Thomson estimated there are some 80 pieces of machinery in his portfolio, including the longest bucket crane in the Upper Valley, at 90 feet.
Ricker also functions as the human resource officer.
“She runs the show,” Thomson said. “She is the key to my operation.”
Thompson keeps a palm-size wooden box in his office, which he likes to show visitors. On the lid of the box in black lettering are the words, “The secret to success is in this box.”
When the lid is opened, the inside reveals the secret in capital letters: “WORK!”
His father gave him the box when he was in his late teens, Thomson said. It’s advice that he embraced.
“As far as work ethic, Dad was (my) No. 1” influence, Thomson said.
Thomson said that, apart from acquiring more timberland and commercial real estate, he doesn’t foresee expanding into yet another business. For one, he doesn’t want his conglomerate to become too unwieldy to manage.
Regularly putting in 12- to 14-hour days after arriving at his Route 10 base of operations at 6 a.m., Thomson doesn’t find much time for leisure.
If he expects his crews to work hard — Thomson said he’s fired people he sees looking at their phone screens too much — he said he must show them he expects no less of himself.
“If you are a manager of mine, then you are a hands-on manager,” Thomson said. “That’s how you gain respect with employees. If I’m not out there digging mud out of the car wash, I can’t ask them to dig.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
