In March 2025, Teryl Freeman and Mike Goodpasture went to lunch, and what they discussed changed the future of both of their pallet companies.
The two Middle Tennessee pallet manufacturers had known one another for decades. Their plants were only about 10 or 12 miles apart; they competed in the same market, and they had also worked together when it made sense. Years earlier, they had been partners in a pallet recycling venture, and they had collaborated on larger projects that neither company could comfortably handle alone.
At lunch, Freeman raised an idea that had surfaced before but never gone anywhere. He asked if Goodpasture had a desire to put their two companies together, “He said yes. He was pretty much, ‘Let’s go for it,’” Freeman recalled. The interest in a merger was mutual from the beginning.
Less than a year later, Freeman Wood Products and Fabrication Specialties officially merged on January 1, 2026, creating FreeFab Pallet Inc. Freeman, 61, became president and co-owner, while Goodpasture, 68, became vice president and co-owner.
The timing is interesting for an industry where independent pallet producers face consolidation, higher costs, tight labor, rising customer expectations and a growing need to invest in automation. There is no single answer, but FreeFab suggests one option may be to look across town at a company traditionally viewed as a competitor.
larger equipment base giving it more flexibility to respond to time-sensitive orders.
A Merger Years in the Making
In this case, the relationship mattered. Both families had deep roots in wood products, and Freeman is a second-generation owner of a pallet business his family entered in 1982. The companies drew from much the same local labor pool, shared the same CPA, used the same accounting software and had similar production equipment. Some employees had even worked for both.
Goodpasture also had a personal reason to consider a change. At 68, with no family successor preparing to enter the wood business, he was beginning to think about an exit. “I was looking for an out,” he said. Freeman’s situation was somewhat different. His son, Ethan Freeman, remains active in the business, although Freeman does not know whether Ethan will ultimately want to take it over.
For Freeman, the merger offered a way to strengthen the company now while creating more options later. “We’re not getting any younger, and we wanted to make it a more attractive business if we ever decided to sell,” Freeman said. Combining the companies into a larger operation with a stronger footprint, he added, could make the business more attractive to a larger company if a sale eventually becomes the preferred path.
That point has relevance beyond FreeFab. Scale does not automatically make a pallet company better, and bigger operations can bring their own complications. But in a market that increasingly rewards investment, responsiveness and the ability to serve larger customers, size can create options that smaller companies may struggle to achieve on their own.
In the past, Freeman had talked with other companies about buying Freeman Wood Products. But the big problem is that they wanted to relocate the business away from the area. Freeman said, “I told Mike when we talked about this venture that relocating was not my wish. I’ll keep it open myself before we do that. I don’t want to go to the grocery store or church. I don’t want to meet these people on the street that I worked with for 45 years and they say, ‘Hey, you sold us out, and now I don’t have a job.’ I’m not going to do that to these guys.”
Both company owners shared the same goals. Freeman explained, “Our goals were to bring our top-notch management teams together, build on their experiences and to focus on providing a quality product to our customers while also providing jobs for our employees for years to come.”
For independent pallet companies, that does not necessarily mean selling to a consolidator. It could mean acquiring another operation, entering a joint venture, or, as Freeman and Goodpasture chose to do, combining two established businesses. Eliminating duplicated overhead and redundant facilities is an obvious benefit, but the potential advantages go further. A larger production base can provide more flexibility when customers need product quickly, make substantial equipment investments easier to justify and provide greater depth when a major account wants assurance that its supplier has enough capacity behind it.
There is also the longer view. Many successful pallet businesses were built by owners who are now approaching retirement age, often without a clear family succession plan. Creating a larger, more efficient company may improve the business they operate today while also expanding their choices tomorrow. It might make the company easier to transition internally, more attractive to outside management or, as Freeman acknowledged in FreeFab’s case, a more meaningful acquisition candidate when the owners eventually decide it is time to sell.
The immediate economics were also compelling. One of the first exercises was to identify duplicated expenses and determine what could disappear once the businesses operated as one company. Freeman said they found significant savings in utilities, insurance and other overhead, with insurance alone representing an estimated $10,000 to $20,000 in annual savings.
The physical fit helped as well. Freeman Wood Products had a vacant building at its Centerville location that had once housed a scragg mill and later served mainly for storage. Fabrication Specialties had productive equipment and employees that could move into that unused space.
Before signing the deal, the owners had updated business valuations prepared and used those numbers to establish their respective ownership percentages. They also approached the legal process in a way that reflected the trust they already had between them. Rather than hiring competing legal teams, the two men retained one attorney to handle the merger and worked through decisions together across the table.
Combining Companies One Step at a Time
The legal work took longer than Freeman expected. Discussions that began in March continued through much of 2025, with the final push coming in December as the January 1 merger date approached. Once the deal was complete, however, the physical integration was deliberately conducted in phases rather than attempted all at once.
The first major move was Fabrication Specialties’ Viking 505 automatic nailing system, along with employees who operated it. The lumber-processing side came later. Two Pendu cut-up lines were moved into the vacant building on the Freeman property, joining two existing Brewer lines. Blower systems, cyclones and piping had to be reconfigured, but by early June the former Fabrication Specialties operation had been consolidated at FreeFab.
Moving equipment in stages also provided an advantage in bringing the workforces together. “The movement of equipment allowed us to integrate the people slowly,” Goodpasture said. Had everything been combined overnight, he believed the transition would have been more difficult. Familiarity helped too, because employees from the two companies already knew one another and, in some cases, had previously worked together.
The merger was not effortless. Goodpasture admitted that one of the biggest surprises was simply the volume created when two relatively small companies suddenly became one larger operation. “When you take two small companies and merge them together, they form a pretty good size company,” Goodpasture said. Going from one or two automatic nailers to three and from two cut-up lines to four meant substantially more lumber arriving, more finished pallets moving out and more inventory to manage.
FreeFab responded with infrastructure work, building additions and making changes in inventory storage and staging. The other lesson was less visible from the plant floor. Both owners said that the administrative side of changing two established companies into FreeFab took more effort than anticipated. Customers and vendors had to change names and records, while receivables, payables and other accounting functions had to move to the new entity.
Goodpasture said they should have started that process sooner. Even eight months after the merger, a small number of vendors were still working through the change. Operationally, however, retention has been strong. FreeFab kept almost all of the combined customer base and most employees, including the management teams.
A Bigger Platform for What Comes Next
Today, FreeFab employs 49 people on its 30-acre Centerville campus. It produces GMA and custom pallets, with Freeman estimating about 320 pallet configurations currently in production. The company serves a roughly 200-mile radius. About 75% of its lumber consumption is hardwood, supplemented by kiln-dried pine and other softwood.
The equipment lineup reflects the added capacity. FreeFab now operates three Viking 505 nailing systems, all less than two years old, along with a Woodpecker nailing machine. On the lumber-processing side, it has the two Pendu cut-up lines brought over from Fabrication Specialties and two Brewer lines, along with newly purchased Pendu front-end equipment used in the consolidated operation.
For customers, Freeman said the biggest immediate benefit is flexibility. Freeman Wood Products had long emphasized quick turnaround, but the larger equipment base gives FreeFab more ways to respond when a time-sensitive order arrives. Work can be shifted among available machines rather than waiting for one line to open.
The merger has not eliminated the need for further investment. If anything, the owners see the larger company as a better platform for expansion and further automation. Freeman has already discussed future equipment upgrades and possible robotics, while Goodpasture sees growing pressure from both labor availability and customer requirements.
“As pallet quality is becoming more and more important, and labor is less available, we as pallet producers are going to need to do more with less,” Goodpasture said. In the short term, he added, producers will also need to increasingly deliver on higher quality to meet rising customer expectations.
For two owners who spent decades competing a few miles apart, those changing conditions helped make the advantages of combining difficult to ignore. FreeFab is still fine-tuning the larger operation, but Freeman and Goodpasture are now approaching the next round of investment, automation and succession decisions from the same side of town.
