pricing

5 Ways to Make Money Now With Your Woodworking

by Adam

When you’re just starting out in woodworking, it can be intimidating trying to figure out how you’re going to bring in steady cash.

The current economic scare these days doesn’t seem to help much. Not to mention the fact that in the beginning, most of us start quite aways off from our ideal vision of a woodworking business.

So, how can you make some quick money while building up your furniture offerings?

Here are five ways that myself and others have found to fill the money gap in between bigger furniture jobs.

Offer services

Is there a service you can add to your woodworking offerings? What can you do that’s related to the products you’re already offering people?

Often times, services can be a great way for people to being working with you. This makes it much easier to turn them into clients of your main offerings.

So, take a long look at what you do in the woodshop and see what types of services you can add on that can fill a definite need and that you can start doing ASAP.

Some common services are:

  • Refinishing furniutre
  • Furniture repair
  • Antique restoration & repair
  • Custom finishing
  • Kitchen cabinet installation
  • Custom trim and molding
  • Caning and woven seat repair
  • Upholstery service

Also, do you have an industrial tool that most area woodworkers don’t?

Let’s say you have an awesome 36″ industrial drum sander. You could offer services sanding large panels, doors, table tops, etc. Most woodworkers would gladly pay for time on a machine that will get the job done fast and efficiently.

The key to offering services is to be creative, look for immediate needs you can fill with the shop you already have, and get the word out fast. Then, you’ll have an additional income stream going in no time!

Turn your scrap into cash

Are you really going to use all of that scrap wood over there?

Yeah, I know. You have these cool ideas and someday soon…blah blah blah.

Listen. I’m a scrap hoarder too. It’s part of the qualifications of being a woodworker. But, typically, what ends up happening?

You either get taken over by scrap pieces covering every flat surface, or you end up throwing out perfectly good wood, just to get rid of the clutter. So, why not bit the bullet and turn that scrap into cash?

Ebay/Craigslist- Seriously, there’s a HUGE scrap market going on out there. Just do a quick search for scrap wood, and you’ll see what I mean. Take a look around Ebay for a bit and get a feel for the sizes and species being offered and look at what they’re going for. Then you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you can expect to get for yours.

Limited edition items - One of the best and most enjoyable ways to make some quick cash with scrap is to turn it into limited edition items.

Get the word out that you’re ready to make a new batch of these unique pieces and once they’re finished you’ll have people waiting to see what they are and how much can they buy it for.

Make your ingenuity into a product

Shop jigs – Do you have a favorite jig that you created for yourself? If so, then you have a new income stream.

Woodworkers by nature are inventive. It’s usually out of necessity, but the challenge is half the fun too. Am I right? It’s fun coming up with new jigs to fulfill a task. Chances are, if you needed that jig, someone else does too.

There’s two ways to approach this as a way to make quick cash: Take orders and make the jigs custom per order, or create digital plans in a program like sketch-up and sell them online from your website.

If you do this, make sure to include several elevations, cutlist, and detailed instructions in PDF format.

Furniture plans - Every woodworker at one time has searched for furniture plans. Why not turn some of your favorite designs into full on plans?

SketchUp is the program of choice these days for woodworkers, so create your plans like you normally would. Add all the different elevations and dimensions. Then include exploded views, joinery breakdowns, and a nice finished view. Also, add a cutlist and detailed instructions as PDF’s and viola!

You now have a product that you only make once but can sell indefinitely right from your website!

Sell smaller less expensive items

What can you do if requests for you main work are coming in a little less these days?

Go back to the drawing board and ask yourself what smaller less expensive items can you design and build. I’ve experimented with this and it can be a lot of fun coming up with ideas that are smaller and faster to make, but still reflect your unique design style.

These type of items can sell very quickly online, at art fairs, or even better, as a repeat sale to your past clients. Just notify them that you’re offering these smaller items as a new line and make it very easy for them to reserve one before you even build it.

In fact, if you make one, set it up on your site as an example and start taking pre-orders from your past clients that way. Guess what? You’re now getting paid to make them. Awesome.

Sell your tools

What?! Sell my precious tools?!!? Calm down. Let me explain.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever made a wooden handplane, spokeshave, or any tool for that matter. You really enjoyed it, right?

I do too, but not all woodworkers want to do this. They want the experience of using handmade tools, but they don’t want to take the time to build them.

So, why not sell a small line of custom hand tools that you can produce quickly and affordably. I know, you’re not James Krenov or Clark & Williams, but you don’t have to be.

Handplanes, wooden mallets, small chisels, spokeshaves, marking gauges, dovetail markers, marking knives…the list goes on and on. You could even design a getting started handtool kit with all the essential handmade hand tools included.

If you go this route, here’s a quick tip: Put up one or several videos on the sales page of your site showing you using the tool. You can talk if you like, explaining the process and benefits, but even just a short video showing the tool in action will help convince people to buy. Do that and watch the sales come in.

Well those are my top five tips to start bringing in money to your woodshop in a hurry. I’ve used a lot of these at various times and what’s great about them is you can start most of them with little or no investment since you’re just using the tools and materials you already have on hand.

So, what are some of the ways you’ve brought in some quick extra cash with your woodworking?

Here’s what some Twitter folk came up with.

So, now it’s back to you. What ways can you or have you been able to make quick cash in your woodshop?

Want to learn a 6th way to make money with woodworking? Grab your copy of the Woodworking CAN Pay Your Bills E-course today!

A Little Pricing Secret You Probably Overlooked

by Adam

In the first installment of the Pricing Your Work series, we looked at how adopting an hourly rate pricing structure is actually keeping you from making a better profit from your passion by becoming a slave to the clock.

In this second part, I want to reveal to you an often overlooked pricing technique that does indeed allow greater freedom in your work and keeps you from being a slave to the demands of the clock.

Oh, and it helps with the profit end of things too!

Are you charging for the process or the product?

When you use per hour pricing, you’re basically charging people for the process of making their furniture. Seems logical right?

We need to cover our costs and time. Yes, but you’re overlooking the end result.

The final product is a combination of your design expertise, artistic vision, refined skills, and the client’s desperate needs and fantasies. So, what you end up with is more than a table. It’s a collaboration of skill, desire, and need. So what you really end up with is an object that brings value to the customer.

Whether it was commissioned or a speculative piece, there is an inherent value that the final product possesses. It’s a value that occurs on several levels. So, when most woodworkers set out to price their work, they often overlook or outright ignore the end value that the furniture will have and provide.

How do you even begin to price this…value?

It’s pretty obvious this can get a bit foggy because we’re not dealing with the usual concrete steps that most woodworkers are used to.

So to begin to understand this value, you have to understand the one person who truly determines it – your customer.

You see, when people buy, especially luxury items like hand made furniture, they have price as a secondary concern. Actually most folks have it further down the list of importance.

What is at the forefront of the buying decision is what’s known as perceived value.

This is the value that the customer places on that beautiful piece of furniture. But the perceived value isn’t just about the piece itself. It comes from other factors like, the ease of transaction, overall experience with you and your work, and not to mention what your furniture can and will do for them.

So , where do these customers get the idea of perceived value? Guess what? It’s you.

It’s all in how you communicate.

Marketing is simple communication – communicating benefits and offering solutions in ways that really hit home with your ideal client.

Everything you do regarding your furniture and your business is a form of communication, so therefore it’s really a form of marketing.

Design, construction methods, wood species, finishes…these all are a part of marketing, believe it or not. And these areas that you think are just part of the process, are really areas that add benefits to your final product.

Perceived value is also based on the benefits of using and having your products. The customer has to see these clearly over and over in order for the perceived value to be obvious and worth their precious time of acquiring your pieces. That’s where you come in.

It’s up to you to communicate those benefits clearly and often so that the ideal customer sees you have them in mind. Communicating these benefits is what builds the perceived value of you and your work.

So now to the pricing. Obviously, the better you are at telling ideal customers about the benefits they receive working with you, the higher your prices can go…to a certain degree.

Just because perceived value is at the top of most customer’s lists, doesn’t mean price isn’t a factor. Your prices need to match the value people recieve and that can’t happen unless your work is up to the highest standards it could possibly be.

The worst thing that can happen is for a customer to become disenchanted with you and your work because the level of craftsmanship didn’t meet the level of price they paid. FAIL!

So when setting your prices, you have to have a clear understanding of who you serve, how you serve them, and how good your work is. It’s a gut check for most woodworkers because we’re famous for undervaluing ourselves…constantly. But, it’s worth the time to get very clear on your true value and worth as a craftsperson and stop selling yourself short.

You’re not being humble when you devalue yourself. You’re selfishly denying your customers, your business, and yourself the benefits and long term rewards that come from knowing your true worth and going out and getting it.

By taking a long look at the value and benefits your work provides, you can then begin to see where your prices need to fall.

I’m willing to bet for most of you, it’s higher than you thought (and if your first response to this is that your customers would never pay what you think you should charge, then you need to fire your existing customers and get better ones. But that’s a different topic).

As you can see, in order to understand how to price for value, you have to begin understanding yourself and your customer.

Gaining clarity on these two individuals opens up the doors for you to grow and fulfill not only the customer’s desires, but yours as well.

What overlooked value does your work bring to the customer? Have you been factoring that into your pricing?

Confused About Pricing? It’s Because You’re Buying Into a Lie

by Adam

This is the first in a series of posts covering the topics around pricing your work.

What’s the most confusing and painful aspect of woodworking?

Mentaly speaking, I mean. (We’ll not get into the physical pains associated with our craft.) I’m willing to bet that for most of you it’s the quest to disocver the answer to the ever-present question:

“How much should I charge for this?”

Pricing is one area that woodworkers can really get it all wrong.

Even with all the discussions, blog posts, articles, books, and forum threads dealing with this subject, we’re still seeing more and more people throwing their hands in the air out of total frustration and confusion. And with all these apparent discussions going on there still apears to be a lack of resources on the subject. We haven’t seen a book published on the subject in almost ten years.

Strange? Well, maybe not considering most of the advice being drolled out is irrelevant, outdated, and based on a big fat lie.

It’a a lie that keeps woodworkers from really growing and doing their highest most valuable work, while breeding complacency for just being active. And there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve been buying in to this lie for a long time.

Before we expose this giant falsehood, let’s take a look at what’s being passed around as the common pricing formula for woodworkers:

What you consider the end-all is really just a starting point.

Here’s a version of the standard answer to “How do I know what to charge?”

Shop rate  x  number of hours  +  cost of goods  +  15-30% “profit”  =  what I should charge.

Look familiar? I bet you’re using something very similar to this right now. I sure did when I first started out.

This is what’s widely accepted as the end-all pricing formula for anyone making furniture or selling related services. But, there’s a flaw.

It’s just a formula for covering your costs, not for making profit.

Now before I appear to rip this all to shreds, let me say that covering your costs is a very good thing. If you’re going to make a living selling your furniture, then you have to know your overhead costs, material expenses, and what your time is worth.

Using this formula will help you get a foundation for making sure your time and expenses get covered. But that’s it. That’s all it does. This isn’t a pricing structure that is designed to bring in real profit and make every pass of the plane and chop of the chisel a valuable action.

If you’re looking to make a living creating beautiful high end furniture or related work, then you have to come to a point where you no longer accept your time as anything less than precious. Every movement must produce the highest value and bring about the greatest of results. Each moment must be used on the most important work you could ever be doing.

An hourly based pricing formula like the one above, doesn’t allow for your time to be used on only the most important game changing tasks.

Instead, it holds you prisoner to the clock. Time becomes your master, when in reality, you’re the one who’s supposed to be controlling time.

In order to start making life easier on you and bring in profit that allows you to grow, you have to move away from a per hour pricing structure. Before doing that, though, you have to become aware of the un-truth that’s holding you back from living and working at your highest level.

Time ≠ Money For The Small Shop

You’ve heard the overused archaic saying, “Time is money!”

We all grew up hearing it, believing it, and praciticing it. Well, guess what? Time DOES NOT equal money.

This is one of the greatest untruths for the creative small shop woodworker that exists in society today.

The idea of time equaling money is based on old factory and mass production mentalities. You had a certain number of products to make and move and 8 hours of production time was found to be the most effecient for maximum results.

Now, if you’re reading this than most likely you’re a small independent shop with anywhere from one to just a few people doing the work. You create beautiful objects of distinction and provide unique services that can never be reproduced in mass quantity. Everything about you says high quality work with careful attention to details. And yet, you’re adopting a production mindset with how you approach your work and your pricing.

In reality, for a small woodshop, time doesn’t equal money. Time equals time. That’s it. Plain and simple.

It’s always going to be a constant struggle if all you do is try to squeeze in as many billable hours as possible in a day.You WILL NOT make money trying to beat the clock completing projects. You will only find yourself overworked, exhausted, stressed, and still grossly underpaid. Is that the life you envisioned having as a woodworker? So why are you still tolerating it?

The reason time does not equal money for the small shop woodworker is because your time is too precious and your product is too valuable to be sold at an hourly rate only.

What if you only had four hours at the most  in your shop everyday? How could you maximize that time so you made money? Is it even possible to do that?

If your income is dependent on billable hours, then no, it isn’t possible.

Your pricing is dependant on working “X” number of hours for “X” number of days a week. (For a lot of you that quickly turns into 7 days a week, doesn’t it.) If you stopped believing the lie that time equals money, then you free yourself to be able to do the highest and best work in a shorter amount of time. Did you catch that? Work less earn more. Yes, that’s what I meant to type.

Let’s say you did indeed only have four hours a day to work in the shop. Imagine trying to make a profit if you worked 4 hours a day at a certain amount per hour. Also, I would be surprised if you were even able to have all four of those hours be billable time anyway.

Shop cleanup, maintnence, fixing mistakes, etc all take away from doing the work that pays. Every second of that time needs to be devoted to the most imprtant work possible. The work that maximises your skills and talent to produce pieces of the highest possible value. Setting your prices by the hour simply wouldn’t allow you to get ahead in this scenario.

Freeing yourself from the lie of time equals money allows you to begin working on the most important life changing tasks and projects.

It gives you total control over your time and makes room for delivering the highest possible value in all you create and getting paid for that value. It brings you into the space to reclaim your time as your own.

It means you’ll never be duped again by society’s limitations on work and life.

So, what are your thoughts on time and money? Is there a disconnect in how you’re pricing your work and how long you spend in the shop? Is this simply the post of a dreamer?

Tell me all about it down below.

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