Tips For Starting Your Woodworking Business - Part 1
When you are first starting out trying to develop a business and finding new customers, it can seem a little overwhelming. I get it; I went through the same things that you are probably experiencing. It does not have to be something that you lose sleep over. Today I want to share some things that I learned in the beginning and share some strategies that I learned along the way.
To be clear, this article will focus mostly on the beginning stages. Really what you can do to get the ball rolling. I will break it down into a few categories. Deciding what to make, building a portfolio, and ways to get customers. Let us get started.
Deciding What To Make
I think this is something that most have a hard time grasping in the beginning. Here is my first tip, don’t feel like you have to specialize in one thing. You don’t have to be the cutting board or table person. I would actually advise against that for various reasons. With that being said, there is still value in it. You may be able to make cutting boards that sell so fast you can’t make enough to keep up with the demand. The downside is you may end up finding it difficult to branch out and try new things, which will inevitably happen. I always looked at it from the standpoint I can make one large thing that takes more time but yields a larger profit. Because of that, I was willing to try new things to help hone my skills and for the most part, learn new ones. This is important because I think that a lot of people avoid this due to concerns with doing something they have never done before for a client. I look at it totally different. I actually tried to do new things for clients and here is why. Not only did I get to learn something new, but it forced me to learn it and get it right. To be totally honest with you all, this did end up costing me money at times because I had to do things multiple times, but what it taught me became invaluable in the long term. I will build items such as cutting boards from time to time, but it has never been my primary focus. This leads me to the second topic.
Building Portfolios
You will learn very quickly that once you start sitting down with potential customers, a portfolio is invaluable tool. Let me explain some of the reason why. First, it allows you the ability to show the customer different examples of things that you have made. Whether they were for a client is irrelevant. It will also help clients get a better idea of what they envision. From my experience, clients don’t really know what they want until they see it in most cases. It was rare that I would sit down with a customer and they were able to outright explain what they wanted clearly. More often than not, they resorted to showing me a picture of something they saw and wanted for their home. This is again, where the portfolio comes in very handy. Now, you may be saying to yourself, “What if I don’t have much in my portfolio?” When I started to realize how much customers relied on photos, I decided to make a second portfolio. I use to take an iPad to client consultations. On it, I created some folders labeled with different items such as tables, benches, entry way, etc. The pictures just came from quick online searches and gave me the ability to discuss different features with the customers. I was also able to use a similar folder to show examples of different species of wood, which came in very hand when discussing color. Having these examples so readily accessible really allowed me to steer the conversation the way I wanted it to go. The more you can control the customers’ expectations and ideas, the better. You never want to overwhelm the client with ideas and possibilities. Get an idea of what they are after, show some examples, and come to an agreement.
Now let us discuss a portfolio of your work. How do you build it in the beginning if you haven’t built much. For the most part, someone doesn’t wake up and say, “Hey, today I am gonna try and start a woodworking business.” If you are like me, you build something one day, decide you liked it, build some more things (generally for your own home or friends and family), then you decide you want to try and make something for a paying customer. Sound familiar? So here is what I would do. Take the time and take some nice staged photos of what you have built. Not crappy dark pictures in your garage. Rather, some nice, purposeful photos in the home or outside with a nice landscape. This makes the pieces you have made stand out even more and add a level of professionalism to your work. That will go a very long way with a potential client. I would even encourage you to use a great tactic that my friend Jason Hibbs (bourbonmoth on IG) talks about on the Made for Profit Podcast. He had the great idea of find a few people that would let him make something that they wanted for their home and only requiring them to pay for the materials. Sure, he took a hit up front on his time, but it allowed him to build a diverse portfolio that he would later be able to show clients. I think this is such an incredible tactic and it paid off for him big time.
Strategies For Getting Customers
To expand a little more, it’s ok to take a hit in the beginning. Here is what I mean by “take a hit”. Expect to make smaller profits, if any, early on. If you can deal with that, you will grow faster in my opinion. Here is why. The more pieces you put in people’s homes, the better chance your name will start to spread via word of mouth. This is what you are ultimately working toward. This will single handedly be the biggest portion of your business, at least that it what you should strive for. You want to get to the point that customers are seeking you out, not the other way around. How do you accomplish this? By beating the price of the other person trying to do the same exact thing you are. Believe it or not, you aren’t the only person in your area trying to make furniture that people will pay them for. You may not always be able to beat their price, but many times, you can, as long as you are ok with making less then what you expected. Doing this, paired with your portfolio and your client interaction will lead to a sale more often than not.
Social media is your friend in the beginning. With so many platforms that allow you to share your message/brand, it would be a waste not to use them to their advantage. Start simple, get on Facebook Marketplace. Build a post with 5-10 pictures of different pieces you have made. Write a simple narrative, something like,
“Hey everyone, my name is John Smith and I build custom furniture. Here are pictures highlighting some recent builds. I would love the opportunity to show you what I can do to make your home more inviting. If you have an idea for something you would like for your home, feel free to send me a message or call and let me make that a reality. Thanks!”
This is a very easy and generic example of where to begin. Sometimes, that is all it takes. I did something very similar and my inbox went crazy with requests and questions. My first attempt yielded over 80-100 messages and one order. Yes, just one order. Then another, and another, and so on. For a long time I didn’t even have the need to post another ad. Calls and messages just started slowly trickling in. The more things I made, the more word of mouth spread. From here, I learned I could target specific demographics and other local Facebook groups (I’ll leave this for a later discussion). This all started from a simple post to Marketplace. The more customers that came in, the more I was able to start picking and choosing what jobs I wanted and not having to sacrifice what I believed my work was worth.
I hope that you all found this information helpful and you were able to take something away from the experiences that I have had. This is a topic that I get many questions about. I figured what better way to document the information here for you all to use as a reference anytime. In the next article, I’ll go a little deeper down the rabbit hole and discuss how you can save yourselves some headaches when dealing with estimates.
Jason