Woodworking Business Has Some Great Benefits

Woodworking Business

Owning your own woodworking business is both challenging and rewarding. If you are able to make a living doing something you love like woodworking you will always find your job to be rewarding. As the quality of your work becomes known in the area your workload will increase significantly. You can make a very comfortable living with this trade.

There are really only a few down falls to owning a woodworking business. The biggest problem we would have was finding quality employees. It is very hard to find talented woodworkers. We have found a good way to get employees. We would contact the local high school and find out if there were any shop class students interested in a job. We would always get a few applicants.

We would then start them off as part time employees that worked after school. My husband would teach them so they would learn exactly the way we wanted our projects done. This worked out really well for us, by the time they graduated they were ready for full time work and were able to make a good pay check. You can find a diamond in the rough this way, we found one kid that just had the gift for woodworking, he became our shop foreman by the time he was 20 years old.

The other down fall is the worker's compensation expense. They are very high for this trade, not as much for your shop employees but with anyone that goes out in the field the percentage can range up to 25% per hundred dollars. It is very steep, we eventually did away with installers on our payroll and hire licensed and insured subcontractors. This worked out very well and saved our company thousands of dollars every quarter.

Something we learned early on is to make sure your contracts and proposals were very detailed. Spell out everything; do not assume people understand your terminology. This will save you a lot of headaches. The other big issue with woodworking is having a document that explains the characteristics of wood. I know that sounds silly but believe me many people do not understand that natural woods have lots of variants. They think everything will look the same and that is not possible, each piece will have a different grain and color, that's just the beauty of wood.

We love the woodworking business, even thought it is sometimes feast or famine. The business tends to fluctuate with the housing market. If the housing market is up you will have as much work as you can possibly handle. When it slows down you need to tighten your belt a bit, but it usually picks back up pretty quickly. What we really love about the business is taking an idea that someone has in their mind, getting it down on paper and then building it. It is very exciting to see the reaction when someone sees his or her idea become a reality.