How I Started My Firewood Business

hey everybody adam here with hometown acres welcome back so today i want to talk about starting your own firewood business and how i got involved with selling firewood now keep in mind that i do not sell firewood as my primary source of income i have a day job this is just a hobby for me we have the property we have the equipment so for me this is all just kind of fun and games and i use the money i get from selling firewood to buy toys like four wheelers and tractors and side by sides and chainsaws so if any of you guys out there run a full-time firewood business this might not apply to you but if you're just looking to do something on the side there's some good information here stick around so i thought it might be fun to kind of start with how i got involved with firewood so about four years ago back in 2016 my wife and i we lived down in the city of pittsburgh we had a teeny tiny lot i could touch my neighbor's house and my house the same time that's how close we live together and how small our lot was we did have a fire pit in the back though big enough to do campfires and get togethers and stuff and i didn't have any firewood when we lived there so i got on facebook marketplace and craigslist and started trying to track people down that just had trees cut down and that goes to show you how little i knew about firewood at the time i found this guy that just had a tree taken down on his property and i thought i'd be able to go over there split it up bring it back and have a campfire that night and that's exactly what we did we went over there split it up threw it in the back of the truck brought it home and had a campfire and it burned just absolutely horribly so that was my first lesson and you got to have dry season firewood but anyway that experience i had such a fun time i had a buddy come over and help me split it all up we loaded in the truck brought it home and had a campfire i had such a good time just hanging out having a couple of beers splitting wood and that really is what kind of got me involved in firewood was just having a good time doing it and that's still to this day what keeps me doing firewood is i don't do it to make money i do it because i enjoy it it's fun and i think if you're gonna do firewood it's gotta be fun so after having such a good time splitting up that load of wood just enough for myself for campfires for the summer i was still kind of hungry for firewood you know i started getting on facebook again looking for more loads of wood before i knew it i had probably two or three cords of wood loaded in the back of my yard there and my back patio was completely full of wood way more than i could ever burn myself with just a campfire pit we didn't have a wood stove or anything like that it was all just because i liked coming home from work grabbing the axe and splitting wood so i had more than i could use so i started listing it on facebook you know for sale i put the work and effort into splitting it and stuff so i figured well i got all this and it's just going to go to waste here so i might as well see if i can get a little money out of it so i probably sold two or three cords down in the city of pittsburgh within i don't know a month maybe two months and that was when the light bulb really took off that i might be able to actually make a little bit of money doing this so eventually the facebook and craigslist ads dried up and i needed to find a better source of firewood so i actually found a tree service guy down there he had a bunch of jobs i was getting wood from him pretty regularly and i was moving a lot of wood so it was at this point that i decided i need to start buying some equipment and actually investing in this business idea that i had so the first thing i bought was a 42cc craftsman chainsaw and i also went out and bought a little electric seven ton kinetic log splitter now it's important to note that that chainsaw and that log splitter i paid with the cash that i had earned from selling wood that i split by hand so i didn't you know take out a loan or anything like that to buy it now granted it was only a couple hundred dollars but still i have funded this whole operation with the sale so i've grown it organically i haven't borrowed a dime to pay for any of the equipment that i have as much as i talked about how much i like splitting by hand i was starting to get to the point where i wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand that i had down in the city of pittsburgh splitting by hand so i needed a way to do it quicker also save my body a little bit and this splitter was small but trust me it worked really really good and it was at that point that i started doing a little bit of research on firewood businesses and seeing how they work and all this stuff and i got on youtube started looking up can you make money selling firewood and i actually found outdoors of the morgans and that is what really drove our move here out to the country seeing all the stuff that mike was doing on his channel selling firewood all that stuff that's really what pushed us to do it we started looking for property we bought this place in 2018 44 acres about 30 of it's wooded um shortly after we moved in we bought a tractor i had bought in that 25 ton hydraulic splitter that you guys have seen that was about the time we started the youtube channel as well so if you've been with us from the beginning you kind of that's where your jumping off point is from joining the channel um i bought the tractor i had the side by side and i had the 25 ton log splitter since that time we've had a few other upgrades along the way as well we've got the easton made 1222 commercial grade log splitter it's got the hydraulic lift arm it's got the four way six way and box wedge that's fully adjustable it's got the auto cycle all that good stuff if you're not familiar with what i'm talking about check out some of our other videos that we've posted with that splitter we've made a bunch of videos with it it's a great splitter and then we've also got that grapple from steven's attachments that really ups our production by allowing us to go back in the woods grab whole logs and bring them out and then cut them split them and stack them out here rather than trying to do it back in the woods the longer you can keep your firewood together the quicker your process is going to be if you cut it up back in the woods then you've got to handle all those logs individually a bunch of different times the first time i touch the firewood when i bring it out with that grapple is out here in the yard have it right next to the splitter right next to the pile pretty seamless process doing it that way and then this spring we got that firewood bundler and that firewood bundler has allowed us to move away from selling cord wood and now we are just strictly selling bundle wood when i was selling cord wood i was getting about 300 accord for cord wood but when i sell one of those ibc tote baskets full of uh firewood bundles it's about a third of a cord and i get about 40 bundles in there and i charge four dollars a bundle so it's 160 dollars for a third of a cord selling it as bundle wood and that works out to about 480 dollars for a cord versus selling cord wood for 300 accord now granted there's a little bit more work involved in bundling it but the cost is pretty minimal it's just my time the shrink the shrink wrap is only about 10 cents a bundle so the purpose of this video was to give you a little bit more of my back story how i got involved in selling firewood and hopefully help answer some of your guys questions out there that might be considering starting a small firewood operation like i said i'm not a big time firewood operation i probably only sell 10 to 15 maybe 20 cords a year but my biggest tip would be to start small you know don't go out and get a hundred thousand dollar loan to buy a firewood processor until you've tested your market you make sure there's people there to actually buy the product you're producing i'd start out with a chainsaw and an axe and work your way up from there it's taken me three years to get to the point where i'm at and have all the equipment that i do now but like i said when i first started it was a chainsaw and an axe anyway i hope you enjoyed this video if you did give me a thumbs up click that subscribe button and check out some other videos thanks for watching

Channel: Hometown Acres

Views: 55,470

Keywords: firewood, business, how to, side, hustle, selling, sell, sales, increase, outdoorgans, outdoors with the morgans

Id: ZYlQORPE8r8

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020