Can You Actually Make Money Woodworking?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the scrap pile. I'm Nick. In this episode, I want to talk about can you actually make money with woodworking? I've made an episode and I've talked about why side hustles can sometimes fail. I've talked about um Yeah, how custom orders failed me for a second or almost failed me, almost made me quit YouTube. But I want to talk about can you actually make money woodworking? And I mean like real money, not just you know, a couple turning hobby into a few pennies, right? 20 bucks in a month. I'm talking about like actual money. Can you turn it into an legitimate income, whether it's a side income or a full-time income? Um, so the I mean, just to jump right in, the short answer is yes. Of course you can. That goes without saying. Everyone knows that. You do see guys that do woodworking full-time. However, I would say that you probably cannot do it in the way that social media makes it look like you can do it. There are there's more to it than that, right? Everything is glammed up, so to speak, on social media. A lot of things, a lot of people think that you can get into woodworking because you eventually, at some point in your woodworking hobby, are going to have the thought of, can I make money doing this? And again, yes, you can. But I also think that social media has created a very unrealistic version of what making money with woodworking actually looks like. Because most people picture just the beautiful projects, the glamour shots, the master shots, you know, the relaxing time in the shop. The customers are just going to start throwing money at you because they just love how sexy your work is. The reality is that usually it's a lot messier than that. It's a lot more complicated, it's not that simple. So I want to talk honestly about where the money actually does exist in woodworking and where some people can get it wrong. Um, so let's talk about just a couple of the methods or avenues or routes that you can take to make money with woodworking. The big one that I always talk about in my examples is furniture makers. Um let's see on the list here. Cabinet shops, Etsy sellers. A lot of people sell a lot of woodworking projects on Etsy. I can dive into that a little deeper. So with Etsy, you do have the pros and cons of selling on Etsy. The pros are it's already a platform. You're probably going to get sales quicker on Etsy because people that are shopping on Etsy know that it's for handmade goods. And woodworking projects are, of course, handmade. And so they know they're getting something made by a person. They know they're getting something custom generally, or at least customizable. But Etsy charges you fees for that. Again, you're using their platform. They have built a big brand and you have to pay for that in your fees. Um, so some people build businesses on Etsy, craft fairs or weekend events. A lot of small towns will have these little pop-up shindigs, as I like to call them, just like in a festival or event, you know, craft fair, whatever. YouTube creators, of course, they make money with woodworking, laser CNC businesses or CNC router businesses, anything CNC with woodworking pretty much makes money. Lumber suppliers make money, digital products make money, and then um classes and or courses can make money. There are absolutely people making great money in woodworking. I just want to make that very clear, but most of them are not doing it in a way that a beginner might imagine that they're doing it. So let's talk about the social media version of making money in woodworking versus the reality. The viral epoxy tables that you see on social media, that's just showing you the finished product. And yes, those can make a ton of money. They are a fad, or at least they were at one time. Um, I personally don't really care for them a whole lot because of the amount of time and BS that goes into it for the final project. If they were easy to make, absolutely you can make money. But they don't, you don't see all the money that went into the physical epoxy, the sanding, the flattening of the slabs, the cleaning up the live edges before you poured the epoxy. You don't see that. You also see perfect Instagram shops. You know what I'm talking about. You you follow woodworking pages and you just see these amazing shops. Every tool's hung on the wall, everything's in order, everything looks amazing and perfect. That's not reality. That's not realistic. You see the quit your job videos. You know, well, if you can make a kitchen table a week, you can quit your job. If you can sell one kitchen table for $5,000 a week, all you have to do is two a month and you can quit your job. No, not the case. There's unrealistic expectations. And again, social media is going to show you the finished product. They're not going to show you all the customer emails, the sanding dust that comes from sanding, the failed finishes, the stuff you mess up, the wood that splits, you have to repair it, all the time waiting on the glue to dry, the late nights that you spend in your shop. You don't see that stuff on social media. Now, where a lot of people are going to fail is that they build what they like. As a maker, you got into this hobby because you like it. I've talked about this before. A hobby, that's exactly what you do in a hobby. You do it because you like it. However, if you're turning this into a business, and again, I'm talking about making money as a woodworker, you have got to give the people what they want. You cannot care as much about what you want. You might like walnut kitchen tables, but if the people like white oak and you're trying to cram walnut down their throat, they're not going to like that. You have got to give the people what they want if you want to make money with this. Um, overly artistic is what you might want. You might want that extra flair, that extra detail. But what the people want is just a basic table or a basic piece of art. They don't want something overcomplicated. I'm hypothizing here. They may very well want that, but the point I'm trying to make is you're making things that no one actually buys. They might care about it, but they don't buy it because they don't want that. That's what you want. And you're not buying from yourself. You need to give people what they want. Um again, you to summarize, I would say that a lot of people are building masterpieces for a market that actually just wants something simple. Something to consider if you're trying to make money. Number two, underpricing. I've talked about this almost every single episode. You have got to consider your pricing. If you are not considering your pricing, or if you're charging too little, which I if you're listening to this, you probably are. And I'm not saying that I'm more knowledgeable about this than you are. You might have your stuff down perfectly to a system, but most people that are in the woodworking space are not charging enough. You have got to charge for your label, labor, your consumables, your mistakes, your delivery, your time, your installation. You've got to charge for that. A lot of beginner woodworkers calculate the lumber cost and they completely ignore their own time. You've got to consider that. Number three, of and these are reasons as to why some people fail at making money as a woodworker. Number three is that they treat every project like a one-off project. Well, I do custom woodworking, so every project's a little bit different. Well, that can be true. Every project can be a little bit different, but you have got to have some sort of system and consistency and simplicity in order to batch stuff and have a real business that can make you money. Custom projects, every single time, if you are doing something completely different, every single project, it's gonna be very hard to grow a business that can make you money. Um, because there's just so many inefficiencies. You're not set up for one thing over and over and over. And I'm not saying it has to be like repeatable to a T, like a factory. I'm just saying you can always do furniture, but maybe you only do three different styles of cabinet door beads. And what I mean with the bead is like when you put the rails and the styles together and you're assembling a cabinet door, the profile on that. Um, you only do three different styles. You're not getting into some dragon carved on the you know craziness. There, you've got to have some sort of efficiency in your shop and some sort of system. And if you don't, and someone asks something custom that needs to be charged accordingly, or you can say no to that job. It's okay to do that. But you don't want to get to a point where it's so custom that essentially every time you build a project, you're reinventing because you're never gonna grow like that. It's truly just a hobby. You're experimenting, and that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about making money, which means making this into a business. The people that are making the consistent money with woodworking usually repeat things. You have got to do what works and keep doing more of that. Don't try something new on every single project. The next thing, burnout. I talked about this in the last episode. Full-time jobs get in the way because you're probably growing this on the side. You're probably not quitting your job just to go head first immediately. So you have full-time jobs, you have night, late nights, you have weekends, you have pressure from customers, you have pressure from your family. You're maybe missing out on time with your family. And then when someone's paying you a lot of money, your hobby becomes an obligation, it becomes a job. And burnout is absolutely a reason why some people do it doesn't work to make money in woodworking. A woodworking side hustle gets dangerous when every free hour that you have becomes work. 100%. All right, let's talk about the different ways to make money with woodworking. I'm gonna break down kind of different lanes that you can go down here. Lane number one is custom furniture. I talk about it all the time. The pros of this is that they're high-ticket items and that it's very creative. You can do a lot of things. Custom furniture is a generic term, it's a vague term that you can do a lot of different things with. Um, the cons of that, however, are going to be the stress. It's gonna be the revisions, it's gonna be the delivery, the burnout. It's very time consuming. Custom furniture looks very profitable because there's a big price tag on that until you calculate your hourly rate and all of the BS that went into it. Okay. The next way small repeatable projects. I call these smalls. They're just small, repeatable, batchable products. Examples can be cutting boards, trays, boxes, decor, little desk items, maybe laser engraved projects or products. And this is where many side hustles that I see online nowadays work the best is in the small projects because they're small. They don't take up a lot of room in your shop. They're not hard to ship, they don't take a lot of tools and machines or big machines because they are small. There's not a lot of steps involved in the milling and the assembly and the creating of the project. They're quick to finish because they're small. Um, they're just they're they're repeatable. You're able to batch parts for these. A lot of places that I see are doing good with small, repeatable projects. The flip side of that is be careful because this can become oversaturated. The market can be flooded with everyone doing small projects, so you're not gonna stand a chance to stick out amongst the others unless you have a creative edge. Craft fairs. I mentioned that earlier. A lot of people do that. There are, however, some booth fees. Typically, a craft fair, you might have to pay, say, $100, $200, whatever it is, depends on how big the fair is. You're gonna have to pay to be there, to have a spot, a 10 by 10 booth. Um, you also have to consider the customer behavior at these type of fairs. Depending on the fair you go to, if you truly go to a maker or a craft fair, then you probably stand a better chance because people are truly there looking at crafts. They're looking at handmade goods, they're looking at makers, they're talking to makers, they're already in that mindset. If you're at a fall festival in a small town and every other vendor there is doing rubber ducky kid games or um, you know, selling alcohol and you're there selling woodworking projects, you might not be getting as many customers. Just something to think about with craft fairs is the customer behavior. You do need to consider the market, where you're at, what time of year it is, and come up with products that actually sell. If you're selling summertime items at a Christmas market, it's probably not gonna do good. If you're at a Memorial Day weekend festival selling Christmas items, probably not gonna do good. If you're doing fall decor on Thanksgiving weekend, that might do good, right? Consider your audience and consider the time of year, the market, the location. If you're selling mountain decor at the beach, maybe not gonna do good, right? Um, these markets can also be hindered with weather. Even if you're protected from the weather, if it's raining, you're probably not gonna get so many customers that come out there, but you're still gonna pay that $200 booth fee, right? The thing with this though is that it can lead to other orders. You can be selling smalls, but someone asks you for something customer. You can use it as a lead magnet. You're set up all day on a Saturday or a Sunday. Even if you don't sell anything, you could get the names, emails, and phone numbers of 50 people that walk by, potentially, right? Um, and I'm not saying be salesy to get that. I'm just saying in normal conversation. The next thing is gonna be Etsy or online selling. You do have competition with this, especially on Etsy, because let's be honest, a lot of these people making smalls and making the things that you want to sell on Etsy are the same thing, you know, you're wanting to make and sell the same things that every other woodworker is, right? So there is gonna be competition. You have got to stick out. And the way to stick out is not to be lower in price. That is called a race to the bottom. That's not good for you, it's not good for anyone. You've got to charge more. I've talked about that. We want to go the opposite direction. We want to charge more, not less. The way to stick out is to do something different, do something better, do something quicker, use better materials, make the photos look better. You could have the same product, but if your photos look better, you're gonna sell more of them because people's gonna click on your images. So there is competition. You also have to deal with shipping. That's not a huge deal for me at all. In fact, when I was selling stuff online, shipping was the most, it consumed the least amount of brain power for me. I don't mind shipping at all. But a lot of people, that is the worst part of the business. Whatever. That for me, that was the easiest part of the business was the shipping. Um, I have a little bit of an e-commerce background, so that could have been why, but maybe for other people it's not. You also, if you're selling online, especially on your own website, you get into search engine optimization, SEO. This is basically where your site, there's work that goes into the back end of your site to where it shows up on search engines. For example, if you Google wooden cutting board on your brand new website, you're probably not going to show up on Google. That's what gets you there, is SEO. Um, these are all things just to consider if you're selling online or selling on Etsy. You also can try to follow trends. Etsy does a lot of, you know, you can find the trends on the Etsy homepage, the deals of the week. Usually, if something starts to sell really well, it will be pushed in Etsy's algorithm on the search results, that kind of thing. But again, consider the saturation on Etsy. If you're gonna sell something, I would recommend going with your own website. It will be slower, but to get the sales, slower frequency in sales, but it's absolutely worth it not to pay the Etsy fees. I don't bash Etsy. I still sell on Etsy to this day currently. Um, but your own website is amazing. Etsy is not passive income, though. I want to be very clear. There is a lot of work that goes into Etsy, taking the pictures, getting the you know, the SEO on Etsy, getting the right title, the right tags, all that stuff is very important on Etsy. The next way that woodworkers do make money is with content creation on YouTube. I make money on YouTube right now. I get a check from Google, which owns YouTube, um every month before you're putting up YouTube videos. Uh you watch an ad, and I get a fraction of the ad revenue. You've probably heard about this before. But content creation is um it's more than just the YouTube ad revenue. In fact, it's a lot more than just that. YouTube ad revenue doesn't pay very well. Um, affiliate links is a big one. And what that means is if I put a link to an Amazon product in the description of my video and you click and you go buy that product, it doesn't cost you any more money, but I get a small percentage of what you paid for that product because I quote brought you to Amazon to buy that product. So Amazon pays me a little bit. That's called an affiliate link. There's a lot more companies that do that, not just Amazon. I'm just using them as an example. A lot of creators also work with sponsors. I don't do that, um, but a lot of people will. You'll see videos that, you know, hey, this video is sponsored by XYZ company. That company is paying the creator a certain amount of money to talk about them in their videos, a way that you can make money as a content creator as a woodworker. Digital products. This is where the majority of my income with woodworking comes from. Digital products can mean multiple things. You can be selling digital files. For example, if you need vector files for laser engraving, if you need CNC files, if you need, for me, in my case, are step-by-step woodworking plans. A lot of times I will make a project, I'll post the plans for sale, people buy the plans, I make the money that way. That's a digital product. They are downloading a PDF document to those plans. I'm not physically mailing out paper. Um, again, a way that I make money as a woodworker. And then add revenue. Again, I talked about that with YouTube. Um, the next way that people make money is with lumber and materials. I did this for a little over a year, is selling the raw materials. I wasn't actually selling a woodworking product. I was selling the raw material, I was selling wood blanks, I was selling exotic woods, domestic woods. Um, yeah, of all like 30 different species. And I would sell them in pin blanks, knife scales, cutting board strips, um, turning blanks, you know, raw lumber, like dimensional lumber, whatever it is. And you can do this as well. Some people do it very well with wood glue. There's a couple big wood glue companies. Um, and and you know, this is an off-putting way of making money as a woodworker because you're not actually a woodworker, right? You're just dealing with the raw material of wood. But I'm having it on my list here just as a way that people make money as a woodworker, maker supplies, so to speak, niche materials. Um, the way that you can win with all of these different routes, those were kind of my routes or lanes that you can make money as a woodworker. The way that you're going to win, no matter which one you choose, is doing repeatable builds. I can't stress that enough. Something that's easier, simplified. You can be efficient in your production. Simple products are going to outperform the complicated products, period. Number two, stop trying to build everything. Again, simplify, be very niche. Do the be the guy that makes cutting boards, or be the guy that makes boxes, or be the guy that makes pens, but only choose one, whatever it is. Number three, learn sales and marketing. This is hard to do. There's a lot of free content on YouTube, online. There's a lot of podcasts, there's a lot of ways that you can learn. But a lot of people think that woodworking businesses fail because of the woodworking skill, but in reality, they fail because of business skills. And you've got to just kind of learn that. Maybe it's worth taking a course, reading a few books, whatever it is for you that will work to learn the sales and the marketing. Number four is build systems. I've talked about simplifying and becoming more efficient, but if you can have templates that help you make something, if you can have jigs, if you can be repeatable in what you're doing and batch out the parts, you're gonna be better off set up for success and making money as a woodworker. The last thing I would say on this is don't chase the viral woodworking fantasy. Ignore what you see on TikTok and Instagram. Okay, be your own thing. It's not as fast as they make it look. It's not as sexy and glamorous as they make it look. It's real work and it takes time. Just accept that, but stay with it and be persistent. If you do anything for long enough, something's bound to work, right? I mean, if you do something a thousand times and you fail, do it 10,000 times. Do it a hundred times, whatever it is. Keep going. Something is bound to work. I think woodworking can absolutely become a real income source for anyone, whether it's full-time or side hustle. But I just think that people underestimate how much business, how much marketing, communication, and really consistencies are involved in growing a business as a woodworker and making money. The woodworking part is honestly just part of the job. It's the everything else, the systems, the simplicity, the marketing, everything I just mentioned. I don't think woodworking is a magical, easy money side hustle. It is real work. But I do think it can become something that is really meaningful and profitable if you approach it realistically. Don't have false expectations. Don't try to get rich quick overnight. The people who succeed are usually not the flashiest people. They're usually just the most consistent people. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you have any questions, please let me know. If you'd like to be a guest on this podcast, please let me know that as well. Until next time, have a good one.