Custom Orders Almost Made Me Quit Woodworking

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the scrap pile, my podcast that I'm starting talking about anything and everything woodworking, all the randomness outside of actually woodworking projects. In this video, in this episode, if you're video, if you're on YouTube, episode if you're listening, I want to talk about custom orders, custom woodworking orders, commissioned orders. And the the headline that I'm going to use, the title I'm going to use for this is why custom orders almost made me hate woodworking. And that's a bold statement because you're probably, you may be in a situation where you are just dying to get custom orders. That's the dream. You know, you're getting paid as a woodworker at that point. You're turning your hobby into something that's generating you money and usually pretty good money if it's a custom order. But it's not always sexy. It's not always glamorous. And that's kind of what I want to talk about. Um I I think most people listening can understand the kind of the concept of turning a hobby into stressful client work. And again, that that's what I want to get into here. I have some notes and I I want to, you know, I want to uh talk through it. I I still just just so I'm clear on my message here, I still love woodworking. I still do woodworking all the time, but custom work and custom clients just kind of changed my relationship with woodworking. There was a point where woodworking stopped feeling relaxing to me. I would walk into the shop and I just kind of instead of feeling excited, I felt pressure. And a lot of that came from custom orders because custom again, custom woodworking sounds great. That sounds like the dream. It sounds amazing on paper. People pay you to build cool things in your shop all day. But what they don't talk about is how it can quickly turn into stress, deadlines, revisions, and ultimately burnout. Um, at one point I genuinely started wondering if I even liked woodworking anymore. And this is not going to be a negative episode, just to be very clear, but I just want to talk through some of this stuff. Um, so let's talk about why they do feel while custom orders feel amazing at first, and this is probably pretty obvious for most people, um, because it's validation. You you feel like, oh man, you know, I've been learning this skill, I've been practicing my woodwork, and no one's even known who I am, what I do. And now all of a sudden you're validated. You're like, oh my God, somebody's wanting to pay me to build something for them. Boom. It's like it's attractive, right? It's it's you know, people actually want my work. It's that exciting feeling of like, okay, I'm in the grind, I'm side hustling. This might work. It's like you see a little flash, a little glimmer that maybe this can go somewhere, right? And then, I mean, not to mention you also feel the wow, this is gonna be some nice extra money, you know. Uh, you're gonna have some creative freedom. You're getting paid to do your hobby, all that stuff, right? The first few custom orders are going to feel incredible, probably, because someone is literally paying you for your creativity and your art and your skill and your hobby. But then the hidden problems start. And number one, the the first problem: customers don't know what they want. They see something on TikTok, on Facebook, on social media somewhere, or on an IKEA ad or on Facebook, like on a Facebook group, or they see something and they're like, Man, I want that. Well, they don't know what they want, they just see how it's presented in whatever Facebook post. They see a picture that the picture looks nice of whatever it is. Let's say it's a table. They see a picture of a table and that picture looks amazing. Yeah, because that interior designer took amazing pictures with lighting, with props, with staging, with decor. But they don't, the the customer doesn't know what they want. They just want to be in the moment that's viewed on that picture. They don't know what kind of table they want, right? They don't know what size, they don't know what material, what color choices, what kind of joinery. And they're what here here's typically the the customer will say, Well, I'll leave all that up to you. No, I never accept that as an answer. If they say, I will leave that up to you, I do not start the job, me personally. Now, leaving some room for creative freedom, fine. But these type of orders are big money being spent by the customer. And I will not give them what I want in return for their money. It's their money. I'm gonna do what they want. They're going to have to make some decisions. They've already made a hard decision to spend a lot of money. Now it's time to make a decision to tell me exactly what you want. Now I can help get you there. I can present options to you. I can talk through this because again, this is my expertise, not theirs. This is your expertise, not your customers. You can help talk through that. But when they say, Oh, just do it however you feel like you, however, you like it, no, because I don't do that. Because again, I have different opinions. Everybody likes different things, right? So customers don't know what they want. I went down a little tangent there. Again, they see screenshots off of Pinterest. They they say stuff like, you know, kind of like this, but different. Yeah. What does that mean? What in the flip does that mean? They don't know what they want. They want the light, they want the the fantasy they see on that screenshot. They say, oh, kind of like this, but then they want to change the dimensions, then they want to change the wood species, they want to change the type of finishes halfway through the project. And you realize really quickly that you're not just building furniture, you're managing expectations. And that's not what you're getting paid to do. You do have to do that a little bit, of course, that comes with the job, but um, that's not you're getting paid as a furniture maker. And I'm I'm using furniture in this example. It can be whatever discipline of woodworking that you're in. Number two, you underprice everything. Again, when you're starting out, I talked about this before, you don't really know how to price stuff. You you I'm a firm believer that most woodworkers are underpricing their stuff right now, even with years of experience, they're still underpricing it. Part of that's just social media, part of that's a race to the bottom, part of that is market oversaturation, um, which plays in a race to the bottom, right? But you're underpricing everything. You're you're you're forgetting labor. That's a big one, your time. You have to treat yourself like an employee of your own woodworking company. You can't just say, well, I'm making $20 off of this. No, maybe the company is making $20 off of this. How much are you personally making off of this? Walmart or Target or any other big brand in the world, Apple, Amazon, the company profits, but then also the employees have a take-home paycheck. Same with you. The labor, the sanding time, the finishing time, the mistakes. You need to account for some sort of mistakes and time for that. If you make a mistake, yes, that's not the customer's fault. They shouldn't be, quote, penalized, paying for that. They're not gonna be paying for that directly. You're gonna build that into your cost. That's part of growing as a company. That's not penalizing the customer, making them pay for mistakes. But if it's your first time building a table like that, you might not know what you're doing. And if you figure it out as you go, I love that for you. I do that too. But you need to account for that in your time. You're not gonna be able to get it done as quickly and as efficiently financially as someone who has been doing this 30 years, 40 years, right? Material waste as well, not just your time waste. A lot of people forget that. You're buying, when you buy hardwoods, assuming that you're make you're making it out of domestic or exotic hardwoods, you're buying it per board foot. And there's not gonna be zero waste on that project. You're gonna have cutoffs, you're gonna have, well, you're paying for that when you buy it. So the customer that you know, you need to factor that into your price because there is a material waste that you have paid for that you're not gonna be recouped, so to speak, in the project when it's delivered, because of offcuts, just the sawdust, the scraps, whatever it is. Delivery time, if you're delivering it to the customer, that needs to be included, the setup, the install, the communication time. If they're a customer that wants to be communicated with daily, hourly, whatever, that's fine. But if that's gonna slow you down and take up some of your time that you cannot be doing on something else, then you need to charge for that. You're charging for your time in the shop, you need to charge for your time talking to them. The customer usually just sees like one table, and then what you see is 14 hours of sanding, and that is sometimes where people forget their pricing, they get pressure almost from the customer, like, oh, this table shouldn't be too hard for you, right? You can get it done in the weekend. Well, yeah, I can, but not to the quality level that you're expecting. That's gonna take me time, which equates to money. Anyways, problem number three. Every project has pressure attached to it. When someone's paying you money, especially the more money it is, the more pressure it is. It better be nice. If someone is paying you for a $5,000 kitchen table, you better give them a $5,000 product that's worth $5,000. This is emotionally important, number one. Number two, just kind of ethically, right? You want to do the right thing. Um, but the so the pressure comes from the pricing like that. It also comes from just the deadlines. And you can discuss these all you want up front with the customer, but you might not the customer might not even have a deadline. They might say, hey, I'm not moving in my house for eight months, and all I want's a nightstand, an end table. So you have plenty of time to build it. So there's no deadline, but internally, you're going to feel some pressure on yourself, right? You're like, man, they're paying me $1,200 for this nightstand. I want to get this done. You know, I don't want them to feel like I'm dragging it out, whatever, right? So you're gonna have deadlines. And then you have actual deadlines. Maybe you have people waiting on you. Maybe you're doing a commercial job and there's a barber shop and they're trying to do a grand opening in three weeks, and they need some countertops built for their barber shop, whatever it is. People's gonna be waiting on you to get that done so that they can open their barbershop. That's a little that that's pressure, right? Then you just have the internal stuff, not necessarily the customers giving you pressure, but again, you personally, we you you know, you might feel a little bit of guilt, you might feel stress, you might feel rushed. Even if you're not, you just do that stuff, and when that stuff happens, you typically lose creativity and you lose attention to detail. Um, you might say, Well, I'm gonna skip a grit of sandpaper, I'm gonna go from 60 to 100, I'm gonna skip 80 grit. I need to get this done, right? You need that stuff starts to happen when you and it's just pressure on yourself, and I don't know how to control that. Um, you can be very mentally disciplined, but that's still gonna happen inevitably a little bit. The second that someone's waiting on a project, woodworking starts to feel different. And again, the title of this episode was why how custom orders almost made me hate woodworking, and this is what I'm talking about. Number four, the revisions. Oh, God. Um, okay, so the revisions this happens a lot in custom because they're paying a lot. They will say stuff. I wrote down some examples. Can we make it slightly darker? Can you round this edge? Can you add this? Actually, my wife wants XYZ. Every woodworking project eventually turns into a freaking group project. And we all know how much we hate group projects, they suck. Um, yeah, I mean, the revisions, man, they they kill you. And and I've talked about this before, but there has got to be a hard line with that customer. When you collect a deposit, if you're backed up and you say, hey, I'm starting it in three months, um, you have until two months from now to decide on any changes or whatever. But once I'm on my way, once I leave my shop and I'm on my way to the lumber yard to start buying the materials for this project, there will be no more revision. There can't be any more revisions. If there is, we need to discuss the changes and the price and the timelines accordingly. You cannot do revisions for free as the maker, as the woodworker. You have got to charge that because they will eat you alive. Not only financially and time-wise, but also the stuff I talked about a minute ago, as far as the emotional standpoint. They're gonna eat you alive stressfully. They're gonna, you're gonna feel the guilt, you're gonna feel the panic, the rush, the oh my god, I gotta get this done. Oh my God, I need to change all this, right? That has got to be incorporated. You're not doing this for charity work. You're doing this to make money. Number five, the hobby stops feeling like a hobby. And that's kind of goes without saying when we're talking about doing custom orders, because a custom order is a business transaction. Someone's giving you money in exchange for a product or a service and a product built in. Um, this is what I would consider the emotional core of this. You're losing the excitement. You're gonna get to where you maybe avoid the shop. You just you you lose the hobby, it's made for de-stressing, decompressing. It's your therapy. That's why we have hobbies, even if it's not woodworking. If you like to fish, the reason you like to fish is because you it's something that doesn't bother you. You you can get away from life, so to speak. You can escape reality. Woodworking is the same way, but when it turns into a business, it's a business. Now it's a job, right? And you feel mentally tired, you start kind of just staring at unfinished projects, you start procrastinating at starting new projects, maybe the scary part wasn't being tired for me. It was just realizing that I was not excited anymore. And that's very scary because I love woodworking. Every uh if you're watching this, you probably do too. And it's scary when it's like you're no longer excited to do woodworking. Like that, that's terrible. That's crazy. That's kind of why I'm doing this podcast, is just to talk more about woodworking rather than physically doing products every single episode. Um, yeah. Anyways, all right, let's move on. Social media is a big one too. It can make things look easier than what they actually are. There's a ton of really sexy, glamorous woodworking content on TikTok, on Instagram, reels, on YouTube, everywhere. It looks great, it looks easy. Big, masterful, grand project reveals the master photos that are edited. The I don't know. There's like this quit your job culture on there about woodworking. Like, you know, all you got to do is sell one kitchen table a week. You can quit your job, do this full time. But just be careful because no one is showing the sanding. And I bring up sanding a lot, but furniture requires a blank ton of sanding. It's absolutely terrible. Anyways, they don't talk about the sanding, they don't talk about the customer text messages all the time, the customer pain in the butt, the revisions, the stress, the pricing issues, all the stuff that I've talked about. They show social media shows the finished table, the sexy glamour shot. It does not show the 27 messages that it took to get there. Customers aren't bad people though. Um and I want to kind of highlight this section, this point. Most customers are not trying to be difficult. They're not doing it, they're not intentionally being malicious or intentionally being a pain in the butt. They just simply don't understand woodworking. There's ignorance. That's fine. That's not their fault. If they did understand woodworking, you probably wouldn't be making money because they would not pay you for stuff. They're you're the expert here. That's why they're paying you. So it's it's a lot of times it's an ignorance thing. They ask questions that you might think they're being passive aggressive or being asking a rhetorical question, kind of like a smart aleck, but in reality, they're actually just asking. You don't know what you don't know. They don't know woodworking, they don't understand time, they don't understand the differences in the type of finish on the product. They don't understand what wood movement is. They don't understand that, you know, and and all that ties into the type of joinery you're gonna use, the type of finish you're gonna use because of wood movement. Well, the type of joinery you're gonna use is gonna increase the amount of time it takes you, which increases the amount of money. They don't understand all of this. And that's fine. The customer, I don't want I'm not a believer that the customer's always right. Absolutely not. Any human on earth can be wrong and will be wrong at some point. But customers are very important, they are the source of your money. So be kind to them, always be kind to them, but be try to do your very best to honestly and legitimately take a deep breath and help educate them. Don't talk to them like they're stupid, but help educate them because they don't know, especially a complex project that has drawers and drawer fronts and face frames and whatever it is, like help explain it to the customer the amount of time that went into it. Even if you're doing small items, cutting boards, but you're charging $8,500 for a cutting board, they might be like, oh my God, that's a lot. I can get a $15 wood at TJ Maxx. Yeah, you can. But that TJ Maxx supplier is set up and they're batching out 100 boards an hour. This is a handmade custom board made by a human, not a machine. Takes time. If you're doing trays and you're just throwing it on the CNC machine, a custom order, a custom trade that's done on the CNC, the CNC may knock it out in 30 minutes and you're charging $150. And the customer might say, Wow, that's expensive. Yeah, but do you have a CNC machine? Or are you paying me because I have the skills to do CNC work and you don't? That's why they're paying you. It's not for the time it took on the CNC. It took time to learn that you're paying me for the time it took me to learn how to become a CNC operator and how to set up the files and do the design work and prepare the wood. That's what you're paying for. Anyways, customers are not the devil here, right? Just be mindful of that. So, what actually helped in my situation to not hate woodworking, right? Number one, stop saying yes to everything. It might be hard for you to do right now if you're watching and you're kind of in the beginner grind stage of building a business trying to get customers, you're gonna have temptations to say yes to everything that comes through the door. That's fine. Do whatever you want, but be careful. Um, you have got to have boundaries. You have to have boundaries with yourself, you know, set mental boundaries. You know, you don't want to ruin your life over this. Um, also boundaries with your customers, boundaries on what you do and do not do. Learning to decline projects is a little bit of a learned skill. It might take some time to do that. And then and with that, stick to a certain style or a certain product. And I've talked about this before, but I have a big problem with that. I have a shiny object syndrome. I might be working on the very first type of woodworking I ever did was lathe work. I started on the lathe. I started with doing pins originally, lathe turn pins, bowls, um, that kind of thing. Even nowadays, I still use my lathe a ton. I am I consider myself primarily a lathe turner. But I've gone through everything. I've done laser work, CNC work, a lot of cabinet work, furniture work, all of it. You've got to narrow down. And if you're not doing cabinets, you're doing um cutting boards, trays, wall decor, signs, things like that. But someone asks you to do a cabinet, you're gonna be really tempted to say yes and take the job because that cabinet's gonna pay a ton of money compared to what you're making per item on a tray or a cutting board. But you're not set up for cabinet work. You're not set up like your shop is not laid out for that. You're not in the mental frame of mind to do cabinet work. Don't say yes just because the money sign is big. You've got to decline projects you're not comfortable with and not gonna be burnt out on because what's gonna happen is you're gonna say yes to that cabinet job, and then you're gonna get halfway through and you're gonna be so stressed because you have no idea what you're doing. This is the most amount of money, there's a lot of money on the line, and you're gonna be so stressed, you're gonna get burnt out. And now, when you get done with that cabinet job, not only are you gonna be done with cabinets, you're gonna be done with the stuff you were doing and the smalls and the trays and the cutting boards because you're so burnt out. Say no to some things. You don't have to say yes to everything, and you don't have to give the read the people a reason why. They might say something along the lines of, Well, you're a woodworker, why can't you do it? It's like, well, no, I'm a small woodworker. I do small projects, I do wood carving, I do what you know. You you can explain that. You can just say, I'm not set up for that. I don't have the tools for that. I'm not, there's different types of woodworkers, right? If you're an engineer, You don't do all types of engineering. You might be a structural engineer that does not do mechanical engineering. You might be a civil engineer that does not do geological engineering, right? There's different disciplines, just like a doctor. An orthopedic is not an orthodontic, right? Like bad example. But the easiest way, though, back to woodworking, is to the easiest way to hate woodworking is to be is to try to do everything for everyone that will make you hate it. I promise you. Um yeah, standardized products next on my list, repeatable sizes, repeatable finishes, repeatable designs, something that you are accustomed to, familiar with. You know it works, you know the process, you roughly know how much material. If you're doing cutting boards, you can have standard sizes. If someone wants something different, that is now custom. We need to talk about time and money changes to that. Um the big guys that are making big money, the big companies in the woodworking space, are simplified. They have systems in place because they have simplified. And they're crushing it because of that. You cannot do everything for everyone. Do not have the tagline that says no job too big or small. We do it all. Do not do that. My recommendation. Number three, to not hate this. These are these not these lists I have is things that you can do to try to not hate woodworking as much with custom orders. Number three is charge more. Very important. Higher pricing will filter out your difficult customers. You're not gonna have kind of the riff-raff of customers if they're not willing to pay for it. You're gonna get rid of those, weed out the bad ones. You're only having serious customers, serious buyers with the bigger money. Plain and simple. Stress that you're gonna put up with, there's a price tag on that. You need to be paid for that. You that has value. The labor has value. You've got to charge accordingly. Charge more. Number four, build things that you want to build only sometimes. Passion projects keep you alive mentally, it keeps it fun for you. It keeps woodworking something that you want to keep doing by doing projects that you want to do. It also gives you the creative freedom. But this is a sometimes thing because the way you're going to stay in business and build a customer base is giving the people what they want. Again, I've said this line before, but you're not paying yourself. A customer is paying you. And if someone's paying you, you need to give them what they want, not what you want. But that's why I say build things that you want to do sometimes. This will allow you to stay motivated, stay passionate about it. If every single project becomes work, then eventually your shop stops feeling like your shop. It feels like work, feels like you're reporting, hitting a buzzer at the factory and getting to work, right? It's um, anyways, don't turn every hobby into a business. This is um no, some things are okay to just stay as hobbies, and that's kind of where I'm at currently. I tried the cabinet thing, the furniture thing, and I will still do some of that sometimes. But the lathe work for me is a hobby. I make a ton of stuff on the lathe. I probably made four different things on the lathe yesterday, but I'm not selling a single one of them. They're it is just a hobby for me. I will give a lot of them away. I'll keep a lot of them, the things I make. Um, it's just a hobby. Not everything has to be a moneymaker. Okay, let's uh kind of summarize here. I do still love woodworking. I want to make that very clear. But I had to learn that loving woodworking and loving custom woodworking are not always the same thing. Um, and once I started to simplify things, kind of set some boundaries, charge accordingly, build projects that I actually enjoyed again, the passion can start to come back. Um it's just it's rough, man. The second that someone's waiting on a woodworking project from you that you're paying you big money for, it feels different. A lot of these things I talked about, I'm hoping you can kind of see why and see my stance as to why I started to almost hate woodworking. And I'm hoping, again, this is not to discourage you. I'm hoping that maybe you're listening to this and you can relate to at least one or two of these things that I've said and realize that you're not alone. Um, that is a real thing. The burnout will come if you're not there yet. It's coming. I'm just warning you, but you can absolutely get through it. And you can get through it by doing some of those last things I talked about, charging more, saying no to jobs, you know, being, I mean, you're in control of this. It's your business. No one's telling you what to do. I mean, you can stop at any time and take a break. Um, don't, you know, you got into this hobby because you loved it. Don't let it ruin it for you. If you have something to talk about or want to join me on this podcast, please reach out to me. I would like to find a guest to talk about how their woodworking journey is going. Um, also, if you have a subject matter, a question, anything for me to discuss on the next episode, please send that to me as well. For now, hit subscribe, leave a review on your podcast player, and uh like the podcast episode if you're able to do that on whatever platform you're listening or watching on. Anyways, thanks for uh joining me, and we'll talk to you next time.