Can you really make money doing woodworking?

Can you really make money doing woodworking? Sure Can!

Can you make a living doing woodworking? Yep, sure can.

Is it easy to do? Nope, but it’s not as hard as most think.

I like the attitude and direction that most members here on this site have shown as what they would like to see and that is; let’s talk about woodworking and leave the social media to the other sites.

I would like to keep a series going on the business end of woodworking to see if I can help others get over that stumbling block of bridging the gap between woodworking as a hobby to actually making money selling your woodworking or even making a living at woodworking.

Let me take a minute to give you a little background on myself. My name is John Hufford and I now live in Fort Pierce, Florida. I have over 40 years experience in Sales and Marketing, with 28 years of that owning and operating my own custom woodworking shop in the Carolina’s.

I have nothing to hide and pretty easy to find. You can simply Google my name and you will find a number of links that tell about me and my business. I still maintain a small web-site (www.thehuffordfurnituregroup.com) if you would like to see what type woodworking I do.

I have sold, built and delivered projects to customers in 13 states.

I’m now retired and would like to spend my time paying forward some of my experiences and knowledge.

I’ve written a couple blog series on pricing your woodworking to make a profit and how to market and sell your woodworking. I’ll probably refer to them from time to time, but right now I will start a series to cover some of the general myths of why others say you can’t make money at woodworking and should keep your day job.

I’ll start by saying I will be brutally honest with you and probably step on some toes. I won’t be talking much about woodworking itself as much as I will be talking about how to price, market and sell your woodworking.

I’ve always felt my real strength in my business was my ability to market and sell myself, my business and my product. Trust me, this did not come naturally! I was a shy, bashful type when I first started and those are not good attributes to have to be successful in selling and marketing.

The problem most woodworkers have when trying to make a living doing woodworking is they want to spend all their time talking about woodworking! That’s great if you are talking to another woodworker or you’re part of a woodworking forum like this. But when it comes to talking to a customer, we make the mistake of thinking the customer wants to know how to build the project.

There’s a fine line of telling a customer what they need to know about how you build and the quality of materials you use, to boring them to death talking about how you do each procedure of the entire project.

They’re not woodworkers, they’re not interested in a tutorial on how to build it, or what special tools you have ,** but more interested in why they should spend their money buying your work when there are a thousand other places they could spend their dollar.
That’s why I’m not going to talk about woodworking, but how to price, market and sell your woodworking.

If you’re interested, I hope you will follow along.

I’ll do my best to answer any and all questions you may have.

Thanks,
John (huff)