re: Sharing My Plans To Start an Apprentice Shop

David,

I’m very familiar with Fuquay Varina ( I have a few old customers in the area).

The Cherry table is beautiful and I really enjoyed your write-up on the build. As far as pricing goes, have you tracked your time on any of the tables? Since you’ve built three so far, I’m sure your time has improved.

As you develop your business, you will really want to track your time for each phase of a build, that way you will be able to estimate your time more accurately on future projects. Another words, once you know how long it takes you to hand dovetail a drawer, then it doesn’t matter if the project has one drawer or 10 drawers, you should be able to get a good feel on how long that phase of the build will take.

I used to keep a time card on every build I did for the first couple years I was in business. It took extra time to keep track of every minute of the build, but it was a great “eye opener” as to where I was spending a lot of my time and how I could improve.

Pricing our woodworking is one of the hardest things to get comfortable with and even after years of doing it, you will still have times you want to doubt your prices, but once you establish a fact based way of pricing your work ,(making sure you are covering all your cost such as overhead, materials, labor and profit) you will feel confident is quoting a price that will allow you to charge a fair price for your work.

That doesn’t mean it will be the lowest price or a price a customer may be willing to pay, but it will be a price that you will have to charge if you want to stay in business.

Let me know if I can answer any questions and feel free to drop me an e-mail.
huffordfurnituregroup@yahoo.com