re: Sharing My Plans To Start an Apprentice Shop

If the customer wants to “negotiate” the price, I will remove features from the bid, but not price itself. You have to be confident in your pricing based on your abilities and know what your work is worth, otherwise you will end up losing money.

Bill makes a great point! Too many times, if a woodworkers is questioned about their price and the customer wants to “negotiate”, they (the woodworker) automatically feels they are too high priced and lowers the price.

I did a blog series on Lumber Jocks about pricing your woodworking and it is based on having a shop labor rate like Bill mentions to make sure you are covering “all” cost of building a project.

If your pricing is based on facts, then you should have the confidence to quote a customer knowing that is the best price you can offer other then removing features and/or downsizing the project. Just lowering the price, tells the customer that you weren’t confident in your pricing or your work from the very beginning and that will never give the customer much confidence in you.