So You Want To Start A Firewood Business???

hey everybody adam here with hometown acres welcome back so today i want to talk about 10 things to consider before starting a firewood business stick around [Music] all right so let's start off with a little bit about me if you're new to the channel my name is adam and i run a small hobby firewood business on the side i have a day job i am a certified public accountant i work in financial analysis so i've been doing the firewood thing as a side hobby for about two years now and while i don't do it full time and i don't consider myself to be an expert i have sold quite a bit of firewood and i wanted to share my thoughts with you on 10 things you should consider before starting a firewood business so i made some notes for this video i don't typically do that but i wanted to make sure i capture everything so i may be reading off my phone a little bit here so the first thing you want to consider is do you have a market and what i would suggest to find out the answer to this question is go on facebook marketplace look within a half an hour distance of your area and see what are people selling firewood for you know are they selling it for 250 a quart are they selling it for 300 400 what is the going rate for firewood in your area now just because that's what somebody's charging doesn't mean that's what they're getting you know facebook marketplace is exactly that it's a marketplace it's where people go to barter so just because they have it listed for 400 accord doesn't mean that's what they're getting so once you've gone to facebook marketplace and seen what people are selling it for in your area the next step is to actually get yourself some firewood to sell now if you want to do a good job and sell a premium product you're going to want to get at least a quarter to and make sure that you give it time to dry out i would not recommend selling green wood you want to sell premium seasoned firewood that people will be happy with when they buy it now once you sell it yourself now you know how much you can get for a quart of firewood also it's going to tell you how quickly that firewood sold now if you listed a quart of wood for 250 and it's sold in a weekend you know that your price is too high there's what's called a success rate when it comes to selling if you're at a 100 success rate that means that your price is too low there should be about 10 to 20 percent of your customers who say no that's too expensive i don't want it and that is okay don't be afraid by people telling you that you're too expensive if you have everybody that you ever try to sell to buy your wood your two your price is too low you need to raise your price that way you can make sure you always have an inventory and you're getting as much for your firewood as you can and you're not leaving money on the table so number two is going to be who is your customer you know you really need to think about what kind of market what kind of niche you're going to be selling wood in are you going to be selling wood for people to heat their homes with in terms of cord wood or by the dump trailer are you going to be selling higher end premium firewood in smaller packages like bundles or quarter cords or half cords you know the smaller the package you sell it in the more you can sell your firewood for i've gone the route of i just right now i'm only selling bundle wood we may get back into selling cord wood here in the future depending on how production goes but right now i've chosen the path of selling bundle wood and charging a premium price for selling smaller quantities so number three is going to be where will you source your wood from and this is probably going to change throughout the life cycle of your business when i first started this we bought this property with 44 acres about 30 of it is wooded plenty of woods here to supply a firewood business but what i've found is that it's very time consuming to procure your own firewood for me to go back in the woods cut a tree down limb that tree block it up bring it out of the woods and then start processing it is very time consuming so what i've started to do to supplement what i cut on my own property is i've partnered with a tree service company i can spend four to six hours with the tree service company and they'll bring back here two to three maybe even four dump trailer loads of logs that are usually dead trees so the wood's already partly seasoned and it's just a much better use of my time but again that's one big factor to think about is where are you going to be sourcing your raw material from number four what kind of capital do you have to invest in this business idea of yours you know you can start a firewood business with nothing more than an axe i mean if you can find a tree service to bring you wood that's already cut up you can go ahead and split it with an axe and then sell it that's what i started doing when i very first started the only problem with that is you leave a lot of the quality control to the person who's blocking up the wood so what i would recommend then is you know upgrading to a chainsaw when i first started it was just an axe then as i grew the business and increased my equipment list every time you buy a new piece of equipment you gain more and more control over what the finished product looks like so when you buy a chainsaw now you've got control over the length of your firewood then once you buy a splitter instead of an axe now you can place where that axe head is going to be going through the wood exactly where you want instead of freewheeling it with an axe so like i said as you upgrade your equipment list you take more and more control over what your finished product looks like and the quality of it the number five thing you need to consider are bottlenecks i have here supply so again we talked about where are you going to get your firewood from that could be a bottleneck production that could be a bottleneck you know how quickly are you going to be able to take your raw material and turn it into something you can sell if you are just using an axe you know great you only have 50 invested in the business but your bottleneck is going to be production another thing firewood takes at least a year to season now if you've got cherry or maple that you can technically sell that within six months but if you've got oak that can take two years so a good general rule of thumb is you want to let your firewood season for at least 12 months before you sell it so all of those are bottlenecks that you need to consider before starting a firewood business number six is depending on your equipment list how long is it going to take you to procure a court of firewood so when i first started and i was just using this polaris ranger a hydraulic splitter and a chainsaw i kind of figured it took me about seven hours to produce a quart of firewood going back in the woods cutting it and bringing it back out here now that i've got the tractor and the log grapple and a faster chainsaw and a commercial log splitter i think i've gotten that down to about four hours to produce a quart of firewood probably two hours back there in the woods cutting limbing getting the wood out of the woods i can split a cord an hour with that easton made axis and then i probably have about 45 minutes to an hour in stacking so number seven i have here on the list are what are your goals you know is this going to be a full-time thing for you or is it going to be just a hobby for me right now it's just a hobby it's something that could turn into full-time you know worst case scenario if i ever lost my job it's something that i could fall back on but if this is something you want to pursue full-time it might be worth not growing it organically and borrowing a little bit of money to get the business started if you need to produce firewood now to provide for your family or put food on your table you need to be producing firewood now and you need to be producing firewood in a hurry and you need to be selling firewood now so you know normally i'd recommend growing the business organically but if this is what you're doing full-time starting tomorrow um you need some equipment to get you started so the number eight thing you need to think about or i guess you don't really think about it it's just the fact is you can never have enough firewood uh if you're planning on selling 20 cords double it try to get 40. if you're planning on selling 50 cords double it try to have a hundred i can speak from personal experience with just me selling you know 10 15 cords of wood a year and i'm only selling bundle wood i have to take down my ads usually by october i sell pretty heavy throughout the summer and then when it gets to fall time and everybody wants to go camping um i sell a ton in august and september and by october all of the wood that i have that's seasoned is gone i mean i i've saved myself about five quarts to burn for myself in the winter but other than that i sell out by october every year so as many of you know we did a collaboration video with joe from ohio woodburner if you haven't already go check out joe's channel he's a great guy he does firewood full-time and his thought process is if you're doing firewood full time it is 100 unacceptable to ever run out of firewood so that's another thing to think about are you planning on doing firewood full-time or is it just going to be a hobby for you now number nine on my list we already touched on a little bit and that is the drying time that firewood takes so like i said 6 12 18 months depending on the species of wood ash technically you can sell green i don't like to i like to give it at least a couple of months for ash now one thing you can do to circumvent that is to buy a firewood kiln now i would say a firewood kiln would be off the table for most people watching this video they're in the neighborhood of 150 000 so you need to sell a lot of firewood to swing a firewood kiln but yeah like right now i've got probably 20 cords here cut split and stacked but i only have probably four cords that i could sell right now and that's just because i have so much that i sold already of the dry stuff i only have a little bit left of the dry stuff everything else is for next year and it's just going to sit there and dry until next summer when i can sell it the 10th and final thing you want to think about before starting a firewood business is what is your process flow gonna be now this is gonna change over time my process flow here has changed no less than a dozen times every time you get a new piece of equipment it changes things but it's good to have an idea before you start how you want things to flow you know are you going to cut the firewood back in the woods and bring it out are you going to split it back in the woods and leave the mess back there or are you going to split it back out in your firewood yard there's a bunch of different ways to process firewood and the thing you want to focus on is touching the fire with the least amount of time i did a video not too long ago about you know it takes about 15 minutes to stack a third of a cord and if you're touching your firewood you know seven eight nine times and you're doing 20 cords of wood a year that's a tremendous amount of time you're spending moving the firewood around so you really want to think about your process flow and how you can eliminate how many times you're handling that firewood from start to finish so i've got some bonus items i want to talk about and the first one would be do you enjoy cutting splitting and stacking firewood if you don't i wouldn't even consider it you know if you're doing it just to make money i wouldn't do it you got to enjoy firewood you got to love firewood you got to like being outside like i said i'm an accountant i work behind a desk 40 hours a week for me this is like you know going to the golf course or something i just enjoy doing it it's relaxing it lets me clear my head you know firewood is not very stressful it's relaxing and it lets me clear my head it's not a difficult thing to do it's labor intensive but you can let your mind wander while you're doing it so for me it's a good way for me to clear my head get outside get some fresh air and just blow off some steam but anyway i hope this video gave you some good food for thought if you're one of those people out there thinking about starting a firewood business my best recommendation is just get out there and do it start small go out and you know like i said procure and manufacture one to two cords of wood get an idea of what your market is like how much can you sell firewood for start small don't take out a lot of money and just get out there and do it but anyway if you enjoyed this video give me a thumbs up click that subscribe button and if you want your own hometown acres tractors chainsaws and firewood sweatshirt or t-shirt check out the link below i hope you enjoyed this video thanks for watching we'll see you on the next one

Channel: Hometown Acres

Views: 267,831

Keywords: Firewood, Business, Full time, Side hustle, Kioti, Eastonmade, Axis, 12-22, 22-28, Side, Hustle, Job, Work for yourself, How to, Boss, DIY, Husqvarna, Stihl, Splitting, Split, Stack, Stacking

Id: ohVyve_QZN4

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020